For the first time in recent memory,  a major industry conference didn’t place Big Data at the center of attention, and the CEO of one of the hottest startups in that space says that’s a good thing.

In his debut appearance on SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE at the recently concluded VMworld 2014 summit, Basho Technologies Inc. head Adam Wray told hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante that it’s now the workload rather than the systems below it which is setting the agenda for the industry, and that’s as it should be.

That mindshift has manifested itself in two primary ways: the DevOps phenomenon in which developers collaborate with operations professionals to streamline application delivery and the emergence of hybrid computing, where services are relegated to the most appropriate location inside or outside an organization. According to Wray, these two emerging trends are closely intertwined.

“Why does AWS have so much engagement? Because developers don’t have to figure out the back end; they’ve got a set of APIs they can program to and they can run whatever their app set is,” he said. “As that expands to hybrid cloud, you have to ask what does that mean to VMware and its ecosystem?”

DevOps bridges the disconnect between the two sides of the enterprise IT equation, but equally important is having the right tool for the job, which Wray said makes a case for Basho’s flagship Riak database.

According to the executive, the open-source platform provides a stable environment for storing and processing large amounts of information from different sources so that users can take on new workloads as the need arises without grappling with the inherent limitations of relational databases. Those limitations not only encompass the inflexibility of the traditional “rows and columns” format but also the operational challenges involved in scaling that model across geographically distributed environments, a shortcoming many modern non-relational solutions have as well.

“You’ve got the developers who are choosing their database strictly based on ease of use,” he said. “For example, if it’s a document database and this document store has a great API, they want to use it regardless of the fact that a mission-critical app might pound the heck out of it and it has to go across three miles.”

Riak was built to address that issue. The key-value store was designed with distributed environments in mind, an advantage that Basho boasts has made it a popular choice among many top brands. Best Buy Co., Inc. utilizes Riak to power its shopping cart, Wray claimed, while Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) has standardized its  Spine system on the platform. The service hosts 80 million profiles that need to be made available to doctors on a moment’s notice and modified with additional patient information just as quikly.

Wray said the company has about 200 enterprise-scale customers, and that that number will increase as Riak’s scope expands to encompass more uses and industries. The CEO divulged that Basho is presently concentrating primarily on bolstering search functionality and OpenStack support, but eventually intends to broaden its development focus beyond basic himkey-value use cases to the transactional workloads historically handled by relational databases.

“Without giving any more information, I’ll just say that if I’ve got a component that’s already strongly needed by enterprises and I’ve shown I can give them multiple use cases, how many more use cases can I deliver them over time?” he concluded.