EMC is making significant business changes, according to Nick Kirsch, vice president and chief technology officer of EMC’s Emerging Technologies Department (ETD). The goal? To be “all about finding new tech elements” and to remain “bleeding edge.”

Kirsch joined theCUBE during EMC World 2015 to discuss how his department helped to bring in and integrate Isilon, placing the CTO in a prime position to comment on EMC’s coming challenges and their tech agenda.

The benefits of open sourcing Copperhead

For example, Kirsch commented on EMC’s decision to open source Copperhead. While “Isilon has been working with open source for a long time,” EMC had not been. Now that the entire product is open source, Kirsch said that EMC is eager to hear customers’ ideas and looks forward to working with customers to figure out what essential priorities they should hone in on with the platform. The attitude he said, is “come contribute with us, [we’ll] build it together.”

Open sourcing Copperhead has both technological and business components, and Kirsch commented that the tech component may actually be easier to handle. Internally, he said, “EMC has no shared code base,” but now, with an open source model, even EMC teams can begin to contribute to Copperhead. The Isilon team, he said excitedly, can begin to add and enrich Copperhead just as customers can.

How customers approach bleeding-edge EMC products

Customer reaction to EMC’s newest products “differs widely,” said Kirsch. Some customers are “early adopters” who found uses for the technology and dove within. With Isilon in particular, he said, customers were leading the adoption. It’s the same with DSSD, he said: Customers are looking at the next level of performance when it comes to these products. “We see a lot of continuity in customer approach to products.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of EMC World 2015.