IBM kicked off the inaugural year IBM Edge on Monday in Orlando, FL. It’s been a busy two days at the new conference that Wikibon co-founder Dave Vellante has dubbed IBM storage’s coming out party. The conference is a strong signal that IBM is committed to transforming its storage business and possibly challenge market leader EMC. It seems everyone is optimistic about the potential for IBM to gain momentum in the storage market, but as Vellante noted in his video recap of the first day of the conference, the company will need to be more aggressive. The company needs to actively invest in innovation such as flash to drive its storage business forward.

Interestingly, although the conference is supposed to be ‘all about storage’, it has not been all about storage. The topic of big data has managed to become a central theme in many of the discussions. IBM announced it has made several enhancements to its Smart Computing product line that are squarely aimed at providing betters support for big data processing. IBM is adding real-time compression to Storwize V7000 unified storage and the System Storage SAN Volume Controller. The company claims the technology can shrink active data sizes by up to 80 percent. However, big data is not the only news that has emerged from IBM Edge. On Tuesday, IBM announced several new DevOps offerings to improve collaboration between operations and frontend technology teams.

A lot of information was jammed into the first two days of the conference, which offers both a technology and an executive track. However, the official panel discussions, keynotes and sessions have not been the only source of content. The Cube is providing live coverage of the event and sitting down with IBM leaders, partners and pundits to discuss their impressions of the market and IBM’s role. The first day of video interviews focused heavily on IBM’s strategy and offerings. Day two of coverage, according the recap by John Furrier, was heavily partner focused.

Wikibon analyst John McArthur said, that IBM partners tend be very loyal. The conference has been an opportunity for partners to bring their customers and get support from IBM to sell the new storage story. Jon Furrier, Founder, SiliconAngle addressed IBM’s top sales partners in a keynote on day two. He discussed the analyst perspective and how IT is being disrupted by the “Four Horseman of IT Disruption” –  cloud, mobile, big data and social. Surprisingly, Furrier said many of the attendees had never heard of devops and many expressed challenges selling big data solutions because of network bandwidth constraints.

The conference continues today with sessions addressing topics like IBM Social, VMWare and vSphere Storage and Storwise V7000 Unified. The Cube is also continuing its live coverage and interviews. The event continues through Friday, June 8.