As the calendar rolls on into 2016, the buzz around the Dell-EMC merger has slightly diminished, but EMC’s activity behind the media relations has in no way cut its workload. With its presence in dozens of countries continuing to grow and a wide array of IT development opening up new avenues for it each day, the merger seems to have EMC’s activity reinvigorated.

For some insight into one of EMC’s diverse subsidiaries, Stu Miniman, cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, spoke with Brad Maltz, senior director of converged infrastructure strategy for EMC’s Office of the CTO, and John Mark Walker, director of open-source programs at EMC Advanced Software Division, at the VTUG Winter Warmer 2016 event. The trio was in high spirits as they covered the topics of EMC’s use of open-source, the possibilities of the RackHD tool (“a platform-agnostic technology stack designed to solve an industry-wide challenge of managing and orchestrating server and network resources at hyper-scale”), increasing automation adoption and more.

Open-source inclusion

Miniman broke the ice by asking each of his guests to summarize their work at EMC. Maltz characterized his position as: “I have the fun time of getting to look forward a lot, look at all-new technologies as they come out.”

Walker summed his work up as: “I’m here to kind of direct open-source traffic.” Bringing their perspectives together, Maltz and Walker offered an informative look into how their respective branches at EMC are handling the same tech territory.

A large piece of this was looking at open-source, which Maltz described as being “very vital for [EMC] to embrace.” He continued by saying, “For me, the open-source initiative is to make sure customers understand we have nothing to hide anymore.” Coming from a background of working with open-source companies since 1999, Walker commented on having seen open-source move from a position of questionable survival to being integrated in virtually everything.

Automation and integration

Another major point of discussion was the new RackHD project, which, as Maltz put it, “at its most simple level is hardware management.” One of the key points of RackHD’s attractiveness to users is its flexible, open-source infrastructure, which has full support from EMC without being tied to EMC hardware, which Walker praised as “allowing things to connect without … rigmarole.”

The “automation barrier” was also under focus, which Walker saw as coming closer to possibility thanks to “more acceleration based on the maturation of … varied components.” Both interviewees saw difficulties for mid-market and enterprise companies adopting more automation, though the barrier to adoption was quickly being lowered, in large part due to hyper-convergence.

“Everything you’re seeing now … is built to be managed and built to be integrated into this larger framework,” Walker stated, while noting that “customers definitely want to be able to manage all the things.”

Ultimately, versatility seems to be the key for EMC, finding ways to make its products so easily integrated that it will be able to design without even needing to know what customers will put on top of it.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of VTUG Winter Warmer 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE