Speed, agility, cloud-native origins — on the surface, everything about technology startups makes them better equipped for today’s data-driven race. But older enterprises have troves of big data hidden under their tortoise shells that may land them a late-stage upset victory.

“Phase one of the data era was really the consumer companions taking over,” said Ed Walsh (pictured), general manager of storage, IBM Systems, at IBM Corp. “Now we believe it’s the rise of the incumbent.”

Walsh spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at the IBM Think event in Las Vegas. They discussed how to make enterprise biggies nimble with use-case ready solutions. (* Disclosure below.)

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IBM’s enviable roster of large, established enterprise customers are certainly not coming to the digital transformation empty handed. They’ve amassed tons of data over the years — the relative poverty is in the technological savvy needed to alchemize it to value. IBM — tech’s incumbent giant — happens to have the eclectic portfolio of on-premises and cloud technologies to bring these companies up to par, Walsh explained.

The massive stores of system of record data enterprises are sitting on is where the goodies are. Cracking open the vault, however, can can let out a blinding blast of confusing would-be insights and value, Walsh added. Machine learning and artificial intelligence tools are the best bet at weeding making sense (and cents) of it. “That can be hard stuff — you can wrestle with a lot of the tools in building models,” he said.

IBM is working to pull different parts of its portfolio together into cohesive, use-case ready wholes. PowerAI would be an example — it binds various open-source tools, making it easy for teams to focus on immediate business value, not technology components, according to Walsh. Likewise, IBM Cloud Private untangles the brain tease of microservices and containers (a virtualized method of running distributed applications) for app refactoring and modernization.

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE