The changes that are sweeping through the technology space are huge, but away from the big vendor announcements and the startup disruptors taking the headlines, there’s a world of real companies trying to manage all this new hardware and software while running their businesses. Most of these companies are built on years, if not decades, of legacy systems and processes. How do companies integrate the latest and greatest with their current tech infrastructure? More important, should they?

To shed some light on these questions, Dave Vellante and Paul Gillin, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, joined Andrew Juarez, enterprise architect at Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated (CCBCC), at the IBM Insight 2015 conference.

Moving to simplify

The interview opened with a look at what CCBCC was doing to simplify its legacy systems. Juarez said the business was growing, and it was trying to synergize its enterprise content management system. Right now, it has solutions that would not be supported by the end of the year. But, he explained the plan was to retire a bunch of stuff and replace it with one or two core pieces.

Beyond hardware, the company’s application portfolio was also up for review. Juarez described delving into the portfolio as a big part of his job. Although primarily an IBM shop hardware-wise, he said CCBCC also runs Intel, among others, and it is highly virtualized. A lot of its applications were also homegrown. The company as a whole has been reshaping this arrangement to create a standardized IT platform.

Building a vendor relationship

The conference gave Juarez a chance to talk with his major vendor, IBM. He mentioned how problems that came up in their conversations one year would be solved by the next. A lot of big companies, he said, used the conference as a means of talking directly to the people who set the agenda for what will be worked on and patched.

As for new technology, Juarez said that his company was evaluating it and putting the new systems through their paces. In particular, he described how it brought in flash data storage as a proof of concept. Using flash, its response time went way down, he said, and the company bought two flash boxes. “Flash sells itself,” he said.

Watch the full video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM Insight 2015. And join in on the conversation by CrowdChatting with theCUBE hosts.

Photo by SiliconANGLE