Developers all over Silicon Valley and the globe are trying to get rich on the software-defined goldrush. In their haste to create to shiniest, most cutting-edge products, they often neglect to ask, “How is a company going to implement this without upending their workplace culture?” Whether your goal actually is to transform your business or incrementally improve it, Jyothi Swaroop, head of product marketing, ScaleIO (a software-defined storage product) at EMC, advises to keep options open throughout the journey.

“Hyperconverged and software defined is as much an HR conversation as it is an IT conversation,” he told John Furrier (@furrier) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during EMC World. “When you talk to company heads about hyperconverging, many questions arise: Is this going to change our whole business model? Am I going to have to lay people off?”

Swaroop said companies are better off starting small and seeing where it leads — a strategy ScaleIO is uniquely designed for. “Start with 10 nodes, start with five nodes, start with one single application,” he said. He said companies should aim for evolution rather than revolution “and then scale it out to other applications, other workloads.” This allows the culture of the company and people within it to adjust to change at a comfortable pace.

The differentiator

Never shy about touting ScaleIO’s advantages, Swaroop told theCUBE hosts, “We’re killing traditional architecture with ScaleIO. We’re going after markets that were traditionally successful for — what, 10, 20 years? — with traditional SAN.”

He added, “We offer a choice to our customers.” They can run ScaleIO on hyperconverged, two-layer only, or they could mix the two in a single cluster. “Nobody else can do this. This is a big differentiator.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of EMC World 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE