Above all, Verizon is looking to streamline, according to Verizon Labs VP and Chief Technologist Kumar Vishwanathan. Building a homogenous environment, a more common architecture, would allow Verizon “to launch new products quickly,” he said in an interview with theCUBE during EMC World 2015.

New pressures like Cloud, mobile, social, and Big Data put what Vishwanathan calls “lots of macroeconomic pressure on Verizon.” Now, Vishwanathan said that Verizon’s goal is to “look ahead,” and “see what we can do to be more effective [and] offer service quicker and cheaper.” The question is deciding between “different options in the tech world” in order to “lay the foundation for a completely new Verizon.”

Verizon’s innovation focus

A homogenous environment, said Vishwanathan will help Verizon “achieve operational efficiency.” A decade ago, Vishwanathan explained, everything was siloed to the point of redundancy. This means, he continued, that “power usage efficiencies are completely inefficient because you have two CPUs doing the job of one.” “Power,” he listed, “cooling, everything,” is more expensive. And “if you have a bug,” he said, “the number of patches you have to install takes weeks or months.”

There was no such thing as instantaneous in that environment. That’s why they’re aiming for an homogenous environment. Vishwanathan is confident that homogeneity “drives down costs, complexity” and will enable Verizon to “launch applications a lot quicker.”

Handling compute

When it comes to compute, Vishwanathan said that Verizon wants its “software to completely transition to a model where it’s micro software.” The goal is to combine “loose competence […] with highly defined APIs,” and that’s why “we invested in Linux containers, [to] package all the way to production.”

Handling storage

A “big challenge” for Verizon was storage, Vishwanathan added. The company went “into ScaleIO and ECS” in order to “open up new possibilities.” In particular, Vishwanathan mentioned that it’s imperative for Verizon to maintain business even when crashes occur: “When desks fail, apps still need to keep running; when the data center is isolated, apps still need to keep running.” And, therefore, products like “EMC geocashing” were “very valuable.”

Turning to DevOps

Vishwanathan said that DevOps will have a part to play in Verizon’s new environment. What will be key, he commented, is automation. And, he added, “The key to automation is API.” The goal is to gain the ability to “see the rewrite errors and predict the failure” before it ever happens.

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