Storage company Violin Memory, Inc. has taken advantage of all the phases of flash adoption, which was initially driven by performance and the growth of virtualization. Now that it’s becoming more mainstream, Kevin DeNuccio, president and CEO of Violin Memory, sees a bright future for companies like his, even in the dog-eat-dog world of storage.

DeNuccio joined Stu Miniman, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to talk about how the disruption is benefiting smaller companies.

“I do believe this move from disk to flash is one of the biggest disruptions we’ve seen in tech,” DeNuccio said. “I liken it to when mainframes went to mini-computers, mini-computers to PCs. It tends to be so disruptive that it destroys the legacy leaders of an industry and a new set of leaders have to grow up to take the new space, because the switch of a $30 or $40 billion industry that quickly just disrupts the way you think about things and the way you think about leaders.”

Opportunities for IT professionals

DeNuccio added, “I think that’s what happening in the disk-to-flash movement, along with other disruptions of cloud and virtualization at the same time. It’s created an opportunity for IT professionals to really make a difference in how they make their decisions.”

How does storage fit into broader tech trends like cloud, virtualization and systems design? Integration is the key trend DeNuccio said his company is going for.

“I think, generally, integrated systems are a growing trend, whether you talk about hyper-converged in the virtualization space or what we’ve tried to do with the flash storage platform of integrating high-level data services … along with the architecture to manage flash,” DeNuccio said. “The more you can integrate for the customer and simplify it [the better], as the growth is so explosive with Big Data today and the Internet of Things still on the horizon.”

Watch the full video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Oracle OpenWorld 2015. And join in on the conversation by CrowdChatting with theCUBE hosts.

Photo by SiliconANGLE