The kickoff of this week’s inaugural IBM Think event in Las Vegas, Nevada, represents a new approach by the technology company now well into its second century of operation. For years, IBM Corp. held smaller, niche events focused on various technical areas of the business. Now, the company is following the model used by Salesforce.com Inc., Oracle Corp. and others with a major all-purpose gathering.

“This is IBM looking at the market and seeing that it’s better to run a big tent event,” said John Furrier (pictured, right, @furrier), co-host of theCUBE. “It’s a good move for IBM.”

Furrier spoke during the kickoff discussion as part of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at the IBM Think event. He was joined by co-hosts Dave Vellante (@dvellante, pictured, left) and Lisa Martin (@LuccaZara, pictured, center) and they discussed IBM’s position in the cloud marketplace and expectations for future growth. (* Disclosure below.)

Competition with Amazon and Azure

Whether it’s a big tent or small tent, one of the major topics of discussion in Las Vegas this week will be IBM’s cloud strategy. With Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Azure leading the cloud computing market in terms of revenue run rate and adoption, a central question for IBM surrounds how the company plans to close the gap with its competitors.

“Cloud is really one of the new drivers,” said Vellante, who pointed out that IBM still depends heavily on its storage, mainframe and services lines of business. “The big question is whether [cloud] is going to drive growth for IBM in next 10 years.”

IBM currently ranks a distant fourth behind AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud in enterprise public cloud adoption. “The cloud story has always been weak for IBM; they cannot compete with Amazon head-to-head,” Furrier said. “They’ve got to beat Google out for that third spot.”

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