As Dell World 2015 drew to a close in Austin, Texas, the news, announcements and new partnership opportunities that had come to light at the event were on every attendee’s mind.

Tarkan Maner, CEO of Nexenta Systems, Inc., met with John Furrier and Dave Vellante, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to lay out how he saw customer interests and service convergence affecting avenues for storage providers and other IT fields, along with his disbelief in “unicorn” companies.

‘The best Dell World I’ve been to’

Maner was highly enthusiastic about Dell World 2015, the Dell-EMC merger news and his own company’s partnership with Dell.

Speaking on the topic of the merger, he said, “I think this is going to create a huge energy for the Federation and all the partners of the Federation … I think, culturally, it’s going to have a very positive impact.”

Scaling to beat competitors

Moving on to address Nexenta’s priorities, Maner covered a long list of fields in which he saw room for business expansion, but highlighted education and healthcare as “two areas where we have a lot of data, huge data” that had yet to be fully leveraged.

With SDN, commodity hardware and cloud services all merging, Maner also saw opportunities to beat competitors that were still trying to get by with prices on storage, IT and data-center management that he evaluated as simply being too high for sustainability.

Emphasizing the strengths of low-cost, open-source commodity hardware, and licensing different capabilities on top of the basic file system, Maner stated that one of Nexenta’s biggest draws was how “the customer can innovate with us, innovate and build their systems.”

‘All workloads on any system’

Another point of key importance was customer accessibility. “Who cares about software-defined? What a customer wants is application-defined,” Maner said, addressing the rising profile of cloud-based services. “We’re talking to a lot of CIOs … the answer that comes back to us is ’60-70% of our work is being moved to the cloud.’”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Dell World 2015. And join in on the conversation by CrowdChatting with theCUBE hosts during Dell World 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE