In order to survive and thrive in the current tech space increasingly dominated by data and multicloud environments, businesses must continue to think outside the box. As storage grows in popularity again after a stage of stagnation, ‘outside the box’ is less metaphorical and more literal, according to Eric Herzog (pictured), chief marketing officer and vice president of worldwide storage channels at IBM Corp.

IBM is standing out from the rest of the storage crowd with its all-flash arrays by embedding more software than its competitors, Herzog stated. The company offers a mid-range priced product that can get to as much as 10 million input/output operations per second and 100 microsecond latency, he added.

“We put in support for containers, and we embedded all that software and including it with the array, Herzog said. “So we’re going to an era where it’s not just about trying to slap some hardware together to put in an array manager. It’s now all about how you survive in a data-driven, multicloud world. And that means you’ve got to put a lot of software on your arrays and deliver that to the end user and to your channel partners for their end users.”

Herzog spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and John Furrier (@furrier), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the VMworld conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. They discussed storage solutions, flash-arrays, software blueprints, and workload segmentation. (* Disclosure below.)

Making storage solutions tailored and easy

With so many providers for various services, companies often have a mix of partners involved with any one application. It can then become burdensome to know how they all fit together, Herzog pointed out. IBM has worked using a process that allows it to take into account the cloud the customer may be using and then further tailor the solutions to match the type of services the customer needs with their specific configuration.

“We give them these recipe books, what we call the Solutions Blueprints for MultiCloud, that allow them to use the software that comes on the [IBM FlashSystem] 9100, but it also can be sold standalone, to create cloudified solutions,” Herzog said. “And that’s the IP we deliver to them. Then they do the deployment, they do the installation, they make, of course, margin off the install and support and service.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the VMworld conference. (* Disclosure: IBM sponsored this segment, with additional broadcast sponsorship from VMware Inc. IBM, VMware, and other sponsors do not have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE