Open source software is free. So if companies can collect open-source software products, configure them, test them and learn to use them to run their businesses, what place do for-profit companies have in the equation?

An important one, according to Claude Robinson III, senior director of product marketing, converged infrastructure at Oracle. “The old model of going and picking a ton of pieces and vendors off the shelf, spending months putting it together, waiting six to nine months for someone to come back with data that you can analyze to run your business — that doesn’t work anymore in today’s world,” he said.

No free lunch

Robinson told John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during a special On-the-Ground segment at Oracle’s Redwood Shores headquarters that while companies can theoretically build out their own systems from open source, it’s rarely practical.

“When you were little, you built models, and that was great, but when you’re running a multi-billion-dollar business, you don’t have time to do that,” he said.

Robinson said customers need to know how far plug-and-play IT — particularly hyper-converged systems — have come.

“I think the old model of converged IT was, ‘Hey, let’s simplify some of the hardware components,'” he said, explaining that now it is the whole package, including the software layer.

Watch the complete video interview with Robinson below.

Photo by SiliconANGLE