The ripple effect of digital transformation and cloud computing is being felt by nearly every business, whether it’s rooted in tech or simply utilizing industry advancements to participate in the broader economy. Some of the industry’s more historied companies are feeling the greatest shift, competing with cloud-native businesses in the race toward innovation. Industry leader IBM is strengthening its strategic partnership with Cisco Systems Inc. to continue providing the tools and services its customers need.

“Cloud’s got to run on something, so you need some sort of structural foundation — servers, network and compute. At IBM and with Cisco, we’re positioning ourselves as the ideal rock solid foundation for the cloud building,” said Eric Herzog (pictured), chief marketing officer and vice president of worldwide storage channels at IBM Corp.

Herzog spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Cisco Live event in Barcelona, Spain. They discussed how IBM and Cisco are working together to bring upgraded digital offerings to customers. (* Disclosure below.)

Transforming up the stack

IBM has positioned itself well for the cloud by putting software at the center of its value proposition, and the company’s storage transformation is helping to provide better options to cloud customers. “Our software in particular can survive not only on-premises, but can bridge and go from on-premises to a public cloud, creating a hybrid infrastructure. And that allows us to also run cloud instantiation,” Herzog said.

Cisco has undergone a substantial change of its own, transforming up the stack and repositioning as a software-led business. Its renewed emphasis on cloud has made it an ideal partner for IBM. “The [IBM] storage division does a product with Cisco called the VersaStack, and one of our key constituents … are managed service providers and cloud services platforms — which is a key constituent of Cisco,” Herzog stated.

In May, IBM put out a statement of direction outlining plans to innovate in networking through the development of Non-Volatile Memory Express over fabrics. “We did a public demonstration of an InfiniBand fabric at the AI Summit in New York in December, and we will be having an announcement around NVMe fabrics in February,” Herzog said. He views this path as a natural evolution in streamlined processing, increasing speed, and benefiting performance to the end user for applications, workloads and use cases.

Looking ahead, Herzog is excited about the prospect of further digital integrations both within IBM and in its Cisco partnership. “Cisco is one of our valued partners. … From an end-user perspective, the importance is they know that the two companies are working together hand in glove,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Cisco Live Barcelona 2018. (* Disclosure: IBM sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither IBM nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE