The first day of IBM Edge brought an interesting conversation to theCUBE on infrastructure and why it matters. Tom Rosamilia, Senior vice president at IBM STG, discussed how cloud, mobile, and Big Data impact the company’s business, meetings with co-hosts Stu Miniman and Dave Vellante.

“When I said ‘Infrastructure matters, and no matter what we do in research and development (R&D), you still need infrastructure to run it on’, people clapped,” Rosamilia stated.  He also explained that infrastructure was about more than just hardware — it included its management and the software used. Commenting on IBM’s contribution to OpenStack, he mentions that that was also about infrastructure. “OpenStack is infrastructure. Everybody who is embracing OpenStack is delivering infrastructure.”

Asked how public cloud, Big Data, mobile, social were changing IBM’s direction, Rosamilia said, “We really fundamentally changed the way we were looking at the world. We collectively changed our whole agenda around mobile, social, cloud.” According to him, hybrid is a very exciting topic because it is a mix between systems of engagement and system of records.

While the majority of clients see the impact of mobile on their business and there are fairly dramatic changes around analytics, cloud is about increasing utilization.  Asked if renting infrastructure was always going to be more expensive than owning, Rosamilia explained that when it came to cloud, “it started about people thinking it’s going to be less expensive,” and then about agility.

“It’s always going to be about economics,” Rosamilia explained, but from the perspective of agility and speed. “The rental model has been very good for the industry in terms of giving people capacity when they need it,” he added. “If you go here to save money, don’t do it. Do it for agility and speed.”

Commenting on SoftLayer, Rosamilia said it hosted half of the mobile apps currently running on mobile devices. Acquisitions are a way to reach new customers, he said. It’s an expansion, not a substitution, for the IBM business.

“Mainframe is a cyclical business. Western civilization still runs on that,” Rosamilia stated. “What we look at as an industry, we look at the quarterly hardware revenue. But that doesn’t really say where people are.” As customers are cycling through, he went on, “it’s really the install base you worry about. There’s a difference between quarterly hardware revenue and how it impacts the install base.”

“There’s a lot of disruption going on in storage right now,” Rosamilia  said, explaining that the software-defined trend is a huge disruptor, as “software defined allows me infinite scale at a lower cost, that is a great proposition for customers.”

Asked to put a bumper sticker on this year’s edition of IBM Edge, Rosamilia chose “infrastructure matters.”