At the OpenStack Summit Vancouver 2015, disruption and big ideas were the norm, and no one exemplified that ethos more than Sam Greenblatt, a highly versatile tech industry executive. Having played a key role at companies like Dell, Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co., Greenblatt now freelances with a variety of groups on the cutting edge of technology, giving him an insider’s view on the market. He stopped by theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s production team, to talk with John Furrier, founder of SiliconANGLE, about some of the big changes on the tech horizon.

“The first thing I’m working with is a company right here in Vancouver on energy harvesting,” Greenblatt said. “And right now, batteries are the most toxic thing you can have. You look at the Apple Watch and how long you have to charge it and everything else — wouldn’t it be nice to use the energy that you have on your body and that is in the ambient environment to be able to charge an Internet of Things concept?”

Greenblatt also gave a smart packaging example where “you can put a chip in a label and that chip will interact with something else, [so] you can avoid things like peanut allergies.”

Device agnostic applications

The second thing Greenblatt is working on is applications that are truly device agnostic. “How do you develop an application that can go ubiquitous, that can go to a mobile [tablet] application, to a server, all the way down to basically a phone?” he asked. “So, that is an area that we’re all looking at very seriously. I’m working with three major software companies on that.”

Lastly, software-defined storage has also captured his imagination. “Infrastructure is changing dramatically. So that’s why I’m working with Lucent,” Greenblatt explained. “I do a lot of work with my friends at VMware on software-defined data centers, and I’m doing a lot of work with Red Hat on their concept of software-defined. So I’m having a lot of fun watching everybody’s concepts.”

However, even Greenblatt realizes that “eventually, we’re going to have to distill it to what’s easier for the customer.”

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

Photo by SiliconANGLE