Dave Vellante and John Furrier invited Paulo Carvao, VP North America STG at IBM, to talk with theCUBE about the changes in the storage industry, OpenStack and emerging ways to generate revenue.

Paulo seemed very excited about the changes that are happening in the industry, but, as Vellante put it, change is a two-edge sword. Vellante invited his guest to talk about the shifts in the business and the client’s response to change.

Thinking in terms of all that has been happening with virtualization, adoption of software-defined environments, it is a major shift for hard-ball players, who value migrating, not only for vendors, but for clients, from harbor infrastructure per-se to optimizing using software techniques. Carvao thinks this will definitely shake the industry.

So how will this value going to change in the next 10 years? It is all about the way clients have assembled their IT infrastructure to deal with the world of social, mobile, cloud and analytics. When developers talk about smarter computing, they talk about designing for data, based on software-defined environments and being open in the collaborative world. It is moving towards software-defined APIs and “Openness”.

Imagine the internet 10 or 15 years ago. If an industry had approached that with proprietary standards, or lack of open standards, the outcome would have been totally different today. It’s the same today with cloud. That’s why OpenStack technology is so important, because it allows innovation to continue to thrive in the industry, based on open standards.

Commercializing open standards

But then again, how do one makes money? One way to do that is through services. Another one is adding value to your platform.

Carvao aggrees with Vellante and adds that is always starts with the client and its needs. Today’s problems are around managing complex environments. Building software infrastructure that addresses sky-rocketing management costs is a great opportunity. That is an area where both value and money are to be found. There’s tremendous value now in stack integration.

IBM is “integrating by design”, taking greater advantage of its talent, reconfiguring the development teams and changing the way they are going to market. There is a cross-pollination of skills amongst people with extensive software background.

Vellante pointed out that there are different business divisions for software, storage and servers. Although separated, in a couple of years they could be merging and generating new value.

Maturing OpenStack

As a customer-led company, IBM has always embraced OpenStack. Furrier asked Carvao to give in his two cents on the maturity of this market, and the differences between heyday open source and this wave of third, fourth generation open source and OpenStack. What is different now, from the customers’ standpoint, that is also driving innovation? Open source communities are now part of the standards and sometimes acting as an R&D division, providing continuous feedback.

The most important thing for the clients are the applications and the integration across all the stacks. The performance keeps getting better and better, but there is a certain amount of pressure on orchestration, as everything gravitates towards push-button IT. While this hasn’t happened yet, a level of consummerization of IT has taken place. Customers want everything on the spot, and they want to self-provide themselves, a totally different concept from the traditional IT model.