The Edge conference in Orlando, FL is IBM’s opportunity to show off its wide range of storage solutions to the world. While IBM is typically known for its large enterprise offerings, some of its acquisitions highlighted during the conference make this year’s Edge “the storage coming-out party,” as said by Wikibon founder David Vellante.

theCube is covering the IBM Edge conference live. Today, Wikibon analyst John McArthur and Wikibon founder Dave Vellante were fortunate to spend some time with IBM systems storage VP, Bob Cancilla (full video below). McArthur and Vellante prompt Cancilla to reminisce a few years back into his 27+ years with IBM to answer a few questions on IBM’s acquisitions, their strong go-to-market strategy, and insights into the future of storage at IBM.

Beginning in late 2005, IBM recognized the huge potential in the storage market, investing in a big way in storage hardware, software, and other storage infrastructure elements. “We made somewhere between 13 and 14 acquisitions between 2006and 2010,” said Cancilla. “We wanted to invest more organically, taking some of our own technology from R&D, but at the same time not to be afraid to go out and acquire where it makes sense.”

With those and some of the more recent acquisitions, including the new kid on the storage block, XIV, IBM’s storage portfolio has become extremely comprehensive for all ranges of organizations. “You can see that the breadth is there: left-to-right and top-to-bottom,” said Cancilla. “I’ve never seen a better portfolio in my career, and the due diligence process to help us identify, acquire, and integrate new technologies is unsurpassed.” The breadth of the portfolio can be attributed in part to IBM’s model of acquiring companies much earlier than their competitors. “As a general rule, an unspoken rule which runs throughout our hardware, software, and services organizations, IBM would rather buy 20 companies at $500M each over a single company at $5B,” said Cancilla.

IBM is not buying companies and technologies and hoping for the best; it is bringing them to market with a vengeance, giving IBM a strong position in the storage space. A sizable portion of its success with its DSx000 series and its XIV offering comes from server deal alignment in which IBM server customers buy storage as part of their licensing. Most noteworthy, however, are all of the non-Blue accounts that are buying into IBM specifically for its storage offerings. “Since September 2008, 70-75% of our sales are competitive replacements,” said Cancilla. “These are customers that have not purchased any IBM products and are now replacing storage products from other vendors such as EMC, Hitachi, HP, and others.”

The golden child of this portfolio is IBM’s XIV offering, which is growing 30% per quarter. This is a significant number when compared to the single-digit figures captured and presented by IDC in a recent report coupled with last quarter’s earnings from EMC, a firm that relies heavily on storage and reported a down quarter. “XIV had $2M at the end of 2007, then $200M and $500M,” said Cancilla. “We are tracking quite nicely to becoming a billion-dollar entity,” he added. “It is evident that XIV is gaining share, despite some serious bumps in the road,” said Vellante. Cancilla was more than happy to confirm.

So, what’s next for IBM storage? According to Cancilla, it’s all about “flash cache.” In the first quarter, IBM introduced an extension of cache inside the XIV (flash cache) and should be coming to market with the Gen 3 release. “Fidelity is already deploying this in production in a big, big way,” said Cancilla. “Flash optimization is a key part of the future for IBM storage.”