While IBM has not fully shed the monolithic corporate image it held so strongly in previous decades, the company’s involvement with cutting-edge technologies, such as cognitive computing, is helping to cast it in a more progressive light.

During the second day of this year’s IBM Edge conference, Ed Walsh, GM of Storage, IBM Systems, at IBM, joined Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to discuss the modern role of storage and other parts of IBM’s portfolio, as well as its plans for moving into the future.

Building on strengths

Early on in the discussion, Walsh shared a few points that he sees as being some of IBM’s greatest strengths in taking on the new age of technology: “[IBM has] actually gone through multiple compute eras and not only innovated and brought their clients forward, but also, they haven’t left clients behind in the process. You look at that compared to my competitors, who haven’t really been through those eras, and it gives us a culture advantage.”

Walsh continued: “[Another] thing is actually the broad portfolio that we have … because people are challenged by ‘How do I take this and manage my current traditional application environment, and modernize it, take out cost, optimize it?’”

While some operations managers may see having a large portfolio as a negative, rationalizing it as being too much to juggle, Walsh has a more positive take on it. He felt that while it may be wonderful to have one tool that does everything, in reality, those tools rarely exist, and the few that do are quickly made obsolete.

Now and tomorrow

“We call it ‘next-generation’ application environments, but it’s really ‘now,’” Walsh said, speaking of how IBM is deploying platforms and other tools to its customers. And in a time of such heavy emphasis on the role of data, he was eager to point out: “Data still has mass to it, has value to it.”

Walsh continued: “Storage, or data (the way I look at it), is ultimately strategic to not only IBM, but our clients.” He then moved on to address the need for flexibility in handling it. “Having the ability to deploy storage or data in a system or array, which we do today, but also software or as a service becomes really important.”

Walsh also had a positive outlook for how some of the bleeding-edge technologies that IBM is investing in might develop in the near future. “If you believe it’s going to go cognitive and cloud, I have [a] better portfolio today than anyone in the industry, and I have the investments, not only of mine, which I’m driving that direction, but also what you see from IBM overall. IBM is leaning in on cognitive solutions and delivering hypercloud,” he said.

As the conversation drew to a close, Walsh provided a succinct estimation of where he and IBM were heading. “My role is to help my clients transform to the next vision. … To be honest, [IBM’s storage investment is] massively strategic to getting people to the next era of computing. Period. End of sentence. It just is.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM Edge 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE