Complexity is the enemy. It eats time, it demands more skilled people and it rewards little. Companies are looking for simple solutions, and when it comes to storing and protecting data, that means the cloud. IBM Corp. and VMware Inc. are changing things up to meet that need, including point-and-click solutions.

“When you think about your data protection capacity being four times greater than your storage capacity, you understand that with the growth of data, you must also leverage that data. It’s, now, how can you reuse that data?” asked Steve Kenniston (pictured, left), global Spectrum software business development executive at IBM.

Kenniston, along with his colleague Eric Herzog (pictured, right), chief marketing officer and vice president of marketing, storage channels, at IBM, spoke with Lisa Martin (@LisaDaliMartin) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante) during this week’s VMworld conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. They discussed data storage, the cloud and making systems simple. (* Disclosure below.)

Point-and-click data protection

The number one driver for putting data into the cloud is data protection. There’s no sense, however, in companies storing and protecting data they can’t use, according to Herzog and Kenniston. Once data goes to the cloud, businesses must be able to run applications on that information. And because more companies are choosing cloud setups, the market for systems that can help do this is growing.

VMware is part of that market, and enterprise giant IBM has held a strong relationship with VMware for some time, Herzog stated. Thanks to that, IBM offers a number of products and solutions jointly with VMware. “All members of our software family and the arrays they ship on can transparently move data to the cloud,” Herzog said.

For its part, VMware has always been a neutral partner with many other companies. What makes IBM different is its tight integration and focus on the data, according to Herzog and Kenniston. The company’s products are all about protecting data and using that data in the cloud. “It’s all about the data, and you sell the storage as the foundation for that data,” Herzog said.

To back up this stance, IBM has adapted its software portfolio for a software-defined world. Applications have come together under one heading and work with each other to make the products easy to use, Kenniston explained. “People want point-and-click simplicity … and we’ve started to recognize that,” he said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for VMworld 2017. Neither VMware Inc. nor IBM have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE