With new performance enhancements and capabilities, like virtualization and flash, the modern era of infrastructure is upon us. Coders saw their glory, but systems guys are back and building large-scale infrastructures in a modern way. In his return to theCUBE at IBM Edge, Sebastian Krause, VP of Global Storage Sales for IBM, sat down with John Furrier and Dave Vellante and talked about this new age in the infrastructure realm.

Krause believes that infrastructure has never actually gone away, though it might have been hidden underneath the Cloud and other trends. Now, however, everyone in the market is realizing how important infrastructure is for Cloud, analytics, mobile and social workloads. He then went on to say that this was the reason why ‘Infrastructure Matters’ was the key theme at Edge 2014.

Combining Systems of Records + Systems of Engagements

According to Krause, there are also two trends in the marketplace at the moment. The traditional systems or records are still in use, but systems of engagements are arising due to the mobile and social technologies people are using. The big difference now is that, more than ever, clients are seeing that the use of these kinds of technologies provides a competitive advantage. Krause said the key to success on this is for clients to combine both the modern systems of engagements and traditional systems of records together. When doing this, he advised that clients must have a foundation that is scaling, because all the data coming in needs to be managed, stored and analyzed somehow.

Vellante then questioned Krause on how the infrastructure would change to support this hybrid approach. Krause said that the infrastructure needs to be much more flexible and open than it has been in the past, because of the different workloads coming in and the different applications being used. The infrastructure should be a reflection of what the workload is. He then went on to say that this is what IBM offers with Elastic Storage as it has the capabilities to have large-scale implementations, while also being tied to the application and what the workload needs in order to run at a high-speed as well as be reliable and secure.

Concluding the interview, Furrier asked Krause why this year is so important in the tech industry. Staying on song with IBM Edge’s key theme, he responded, “You are determining your competitive advantage by rejuvenating your infrastructure because infrastructure matters.”

See the entire segment below.