The Emerging Technologies Division (ETD) at EMC is tasked with propelling EMC Corp. into the future by embracing innovations like open source and Cloud computing, new areas for the company. Randy Bias, vice president of Technology in the ETD, is helping the company shift to this new paradigm.

“I think of Cloud computing as being a new IT paradigm that largely comes from the web-scale players,” Bias told theCUBE during the OpenStack Summit. “The way the Googles, Amazons, Facebooks, Twitters think about the world is now bleeding into the mainstream, and that’s Cloud computing. That’s not VMs on demand, that’s not self-service, that’s not APIs; it’s new techniques. If you go and you look at the Facebook, Google, Amazon data centers, they don’t look anything a traditional enterprise, yet at the same time, they have very highly overlapping patterns. And so one of the keys there is they all use open source.”

Investing in the future

But transitioning such a large enterprise out of its traditional ways of thinking is not a simple endeavor, he pointed out. Such drastic change requires constant reinforcement at all levels of the company.

“All the way at the very top, at the board level, they understand that EMC needs to change as a business … EMC’s doing the right thing,” Bias said. “You can’t shut down your old business, you can’t shut down those customers, but you have to skate to the future. So EMC’s doing the right thing in terms of continuing to make sure its legacy business goes on, but also investing appropriately in the future.”

That process is most definitely underway, Bias confirmed. “It’s happening. It’s a process, right? I mean, we’re not there yet,” he said. “We’re sort of at the very beginning of laying the foundations. We’re understanding the legal ramifications of doing open source, and EMC is late to the game. We’re understanding what the processes and procedures are … Big businesses are used to selling and generating revenue in certain ways, and changing that is actually a longer process. So [we’re] just trying to make it all happen.”

Meeting customers’ needs the ultimate goal

Still, Bias is excited about changes on the horizon. They’ve released a new set of drivers to help their existing product lines deploy smoothly on OpenStack.

“We’re starting to talk to people about Project Caspian, which is where Cloud-scaling wound up sitting, which is our next-generation, hyper-converged converged infrastructure that’s really designed to meet customers’ requests for being open source and COTS Hardware,” he said.

And meeting customer needs is the ultimate goal.

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