A software person by background, landed in a division perceived by the world as hardware, Jamie Thomas, GM Software Defined Systems & Storage with IBM, joined John Furrier and Dave Vellante in theCUBE, during IBM Edge 2014 event in Las Vegas, to talk more in depth about what her software background allows her to do with the storage division, about the new leadership, the intelligent infrastructure and the way internal messages translate to the customers.

“Why is IBM better this year than last year?” asked Furrier.

“We’ve arrived here with a perspective of, ‘what does infrastructure really mean for our clients in this new journey that they have embarked on?’ and we thought a lot about the new initiatives in the marketplace, particularly around Cloud, Linux, Mobile and Social, and what does that mean for the clients from the storage perspective – it creates an opportunity for all our stakeholders in various accounts to deal with this new data explosion. That presents new opportunities for them, new challenges, and we talked a lot this week about enabling our clients to tackle those challenges,” explained Thomas.

New tech, new messaging

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She continued: “The announcements we made this week are a combination of innovations that we’ve invested in over a number of years, both from IBM Research and in our laboratories. We fundamentally needed to address this new generation/next generation of applications and workload that fundamentally are changing the infrastructure needs. It is requiring organizations to have much more intelligent infrastructure.”

“I believe that the announcements we made this week are founded on those two different premises: what do clients need to drive benefits from their existing storage environments – which require a lot of this innovation – and what do they need to do to capture this next generation of opportunity,” she finished.

What message do you send internally and how does this translate to the customer?” asked Furrier.

“This week we spoke about three main strategies: Software-Defined Storage, Optimization & Performance through Flash innovation across the product line and we talked about the infusion of the next generation virtualization into environments, to allow clients to optimize their existing storage environments,” Thomas started.

“We look at software-defined storage and we believe it brings to a lot of our clients the unique ability to automate their infrastructure, perhaps differently than what they’ve done in the past,” the storage executive went on. “It brings the ability to better manage the infrastructure, to better apply policy and data governance, it allows us to more intelligently tier storage to the most effective media – and not only achieve the needs of new workloads, but also tap into the back office expertise that you can get through things like Flash, disk integration and TAPE integration. It opens up a lot of opportunities for our clients.”

“We see ourselves as a provider of solutions for our clients. Even in our hardware division, many of our offerings do not operate without software. ‘Software does need hardware to run somewhere’ she quoted from another keynote. It is about optimizing the combination of software and hardware to the benefit of the client,” added Thomas.

See her entire segment below.