For the second day of IBM Edge 2014 in Las Vegas this week, John Furrier and Dave Vellante, theCUBE co-hosts, caught up with Norman Filicetti, the President of Data Integrity awardee of the Winning Edge in IBM’s System x server category (see the entire segment below).

“The Winning Edge Award was given to us for our success in developing our learning, technical skills, and for our strategy. We have had a 700 percent in terms of growth,” said Filicetti. “The selling was certainly an important factor, but also important were the skills that we gained: we’ve got technical skills, executive knowledge base, we developed Top Gun type classes, and so on.”

“How are your skillsets and requirements changing?” asked Vellante. “Are the customers demanding new changes? Is there more of an application-centricity, faster cycle-times, any particular skills that you are bringing in to accommodate the market?”

“Certainly, the applications are the key point, we have developed them over the years and we’ve had a strong presence in the Enterprise. They are key applications that we deliver,” stated Filicetti.

Furrier wanted the Data Integrity President to talk more about the cloud and the System x servers’ position on the commodity side for private cloud. “Is it more data center deployments? What is the customer situation?”

“Primarily we are in the datacenter, so we deploy a lot into the private cloud structure, but we also have a key component of our business in retail, and we have applications driven in mission critical out in the field, and we’re starting to virtualize those environments.”

“What is happening on with x86?” asked Vellante. “What does the ecosystem mean to you as a partner?”

“The ecosystem is a strong part of why we stayed in the x86 platform and it allowed us to develop a strong business in the enterprise. We are looking forward to the next couple of months, with Lenovo,” declared Filicetti.

Vellante wanted to know more about the opportunities and the concerns such partnerships between IBM and Lenovo might involve.

“We are concerned about how this relationship will play out over time, but we think that the next move is going to be a positive one, and we will all succeed. We understand the infrastructure and the way Lenovo operates, but they go to market different than IBM, hence our concern whether or not all changes will be positive.”

• Value-added

“The value-add is in the spin that we can make on our delivery,” stated Filicetti. “We already have a unique position in our market place and we have seasoned professionals that can deliver unique and complex solutions when the client has unique and complex problems.”

• Changes in the industry

“Our value proposition is concentrated on seasoned professionals, our complex solutions that we delivered and certainly our reputation. Solutions delivered on time and on budget,” explained Filicetti.