EMC’s commitment to open-source is changing the way the company does business — but it can be hard for such a large, established company to become accepted in that space. Brian Gracely, senior director of EMC {code}, is helping the company make that transition. While talking with theCUBE during EMC World 2015, Gracely laid out an overview of his work.

“EMC {code} is a group that’s put together to focus on EMC’s contributions to open source, how we engage with open communities [and] trying to get the larger EMC community to start contributing projects back,” he said, adding that it’s a small group at the moment of about 10-12 people, but they have a broad focus. “We’re focused on not only wrapping DevOps and open source technology around EMC technology, but also going out and making contributions to Docker … and a lot of the modern infrastructure, if you will, and trying to be relevant in that space.”

Changing company culture

New to EMC World this year was a half-day DevOps-focused kickoff to the event. It blew away Gracely’s expectations with over 300 people attending. But replicating EMC’s success requires changes to company culture, Gracely said.

“The biggest thing that we’ve found is, we don’t do anything in PowerPoint. Everything that we do is, ‘I’m going to give you examples.’ And we’ve been trying to push this culture that shows the company it’s OK to publish things open-source; it’s OK to want to collaborate with open communities,” he said. “What’s been really interesting is we had to break a lot of glass to make some of this EMC {code} stuff happen and get stuff publicly done.”

But after making that shift, Gracely’s team has had the opportunity to work with engineers from across the company.

“We’ve had teams from the Backup and Recovery group give us projects that are now in open source,” he explained. “We’ve had the VMAX team come to us and go, ‘We held a hackathon like three weeks ago, and we’ve got a bunch of things that [have] come out of that.’ It’s actually been a little easier than we thought. There’s been a lot of people that went, ‘The door’s open a little bit, I want to do that.’ It’s still a little bit tricky, but … more things are happening than we expected to happen [at] this pace.”

EMC’s coding agenda

EMC’s coding agenda is also a big driver for the group. But they’re not trying to turn everyone into coders, Gracely said.

“Should my infrastructure look like Google’s? Well, maybe,” he said. “But if you take some of the best practices they have — they treat their infrastructure as if it’s software, they automate a lot of things, they do a lot of things consistently — yeah, we’d like to help push those principles … So is it going to be for everybody? No. But I think just like we saw the last seven, eight years with VMware and the vExperts and those things, there’s a set of people that want to push the envelope and be the next generation of great operators.”

And with EMC {code}’s help, EMC wants to be ready to capture their attention.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of EMC World 2015.