At the moment, there’s plenty of industry hype around Cloud, from economics benefits to the promise of hybrid infrastructure. Software has taken center stage, as we see CIOs, enterprises and service providers build their innovation strategies around it. As SiliconANGLE founder John Furrier puts it, “the software-defined data center is the battleground,” that customers look to for innovation.

In the recap segment below from day one of the recently concluded IBM Edge event, theCUBE co-hosts Furrier and Wikibon co-founder Dave Vellante briefly caught up on Big Blue’s new storage strategy, also touching on today’s reasons why infrastructure matters to the customer.

Pooling pieces of IBM

Vellante explained that the industry is currently seeing the pooling together of little pieces and parts of IBM, to create its new software-defined strategy. The company is riding the coattails of its Big Data project Watson for a portion of this strategy, which comprises “Elastic Storage,” a software-defined storage (SDS) solution that allows practitioners the ability to access all of their data throughout multiple systems and locations.

IBM is also driving an SDS approach that’s heavily reliant on the open source framework OpenStack, and other technologies in its portfolio, such as SAN Volume Controller (SVC) and other virtualization technologies, that Vellante said “will allow customers to go from point A to point B without a giant disruption.”

Vellante considers IBM’s new software-defined approach to be a little different from that of EMC, but there are also a lot of similarities. A particular example notes both companies’ transition from old legacy platforms into new ones. The most notable difference between the two is around the amount of resources IBM is putting into OpenStack, while EMC is really just dipping its toe in the OpenStack waters.

How infrastructure affects customers

Furrier then said that the growth in the market is really going to come down to what the customers are doing, asking Vellante to offer his take on the customer perspective. In response, Vellante brought up three customers who were featured on theCUBE from its first day of live broadcast from IBM Edge.

One was Mike Smith, CIO of Lee Memorial Health Systems, who admitted that he doesn’t want to be thinking about infrastructure all the time, but, when it breaks, he thinks about it. So, he just wants an infrastructure that works.

Mike North, Senior Director of Broadcast Planning and Scheduling for the NFL, talked about how the league’s permutations of broadcast scheduling has changed over the years, becoming much easier as a result of IBM’s infrastructure.

Lastly, Tahir Ali, Director of Enterprise Technology for City of Hope National Medical Center, explained how infrastructure is a key part of how the medical practice puts its investments forward to not only run the business, but to also transform it. Furrier then added that what customers do is what essentially sets the table.

See Furrier and Vellante’s entire analysis in the video below: