Barton George, Dell’s Director of Web Vertical, and cloud strategy director Michael Cote sat down in theCube at Dell World 2012 to discuss the hottest topics in the developer community.

George kicks off the session by tackling Project Sputnik, a recently launched developer solution that he and his unit created.

Sputnik is a thin, Dell ultrabook running on the Ubuntu distribution of Linux, the OS of choice for most developers. It connects to the cloud natively, giving developers direct means of deploying their applications and underscoring the main goal of DevOps – boosting productivity.

George goes on to provide some background info on the early days of Project Sputnik, and passes the ball to Cote. The clod chief elaborates on DevOps, a term that he defined as a fundamental change in the way developers do their work. New and specialized tools allow programmers to venture outside the particular layer they’re used to working in, Cote says, allowing them to increase efficiency and shorten release cycles.

George changes the topic back to Sputnik, and how it ties in with the cloud. He says that the platform was designed with OpenStack in mind; apps can be deployed to AWS and other providers as well, but Dell chose to focus on the open-source OS in particular. The reason behind this decision is increased adoption, driven by both vendor and customer interest.

Cote takes over, predicting that OpenStack will take its place alongside Windows and Linux within the next 5 to 10 years.  He then brings up VMware, and mentions that that Dell recently announced a solution based on Cloud Foundry before moving on to big data.

Cote says that the economics of the cloud are making enterprise-grade technologies available to smaller organizations. Data analytics is no exception, and Dell is looking to gain share in this market too.

See the full interview below, and check here for the full archive of our video content from Dell World 2012.