Judith Hurwitz, president of Hurwitz & Associates, LLC and a long-time industry analyst, doesn’t usually focus on hardware — but IBM Edge has become much more than a hardware show.

“What’s interesting to me,” Hurwitz told theCUBE, “is the bringing together of the underlying capabilities of the hardware, which has always been very strong, very compelling, with the supporting software. And you bring those two together and [it] really is a very interesting revelation.”

This becomes especially true for use cases like healthcare, where security is a major issue.

Building security into the core

“Think about a hospital, the level of security you need to have if you have sensors going off everywhere. Well, if you look at the Power platform and the z platform, there is security built in at the core in the hardware platform itself,” she said. “So bringing those together and unifying them in a sense really is very transformative. And if you go out and you buy pieces of hardware and pieces of infrastructure software and you mesh them together, you don’t get the same level of unification and seamlessness and scalability that you get when it’s really sort of capability by design.”

This is also true for other examples, including the “Internet of Things” (IoT) and rethinking the hardware/software division will only increase our capability in the coming years.

“If you think about technology, where does hardware [end] and software begin? So you look at something like IoT,” Hurwitz said. “There’s obviously a lot of hardware, sensors, and mechanical devices, but that’s not the important part of that. It’s the data that comes out of that. So how do you neatly make a distinction between, OK, this is hardware, this is software, this is analytics, this is data … All of these things are related to each other. In the real world with real customers, they don’t think in silos.”

OpenPOWER a good move for IBM

Hurwitz also commented on the OpenPOWER Foundation, saying that it’s a good move for IBM, although she wished they had done it earlier. She also looked forward into the future of computing, touching on subjects from education for the next generation to cognitive computing, something that she believes will be truly revolutionary.

“The real interesting aspect of cognitive computing is because you’re letting the data drive you toward a solution, rather than letting your assumptions about the world three years ago lead you to build something. So I think it’s totally going to transform the way we build solutions,” she said.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM Edge2015.