 for IBM Edge, this is Silicon Angles, exclusive coverage of IBM Edge 2013. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angles. I'm sure with my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of wikibon.org. Laura Gio is here. She's the vice president and business line executive for storage. Can I even say that? I'm not even sure. Yeah, you can say storage. I wonder if today's storage is going away. But it's not gone away yet, right? You still got a lot of action going on in storage. So welcome back to theCUBE, Laura. Thank you, thanks. It's nice to see both of you again. So we were talking about Flash. You guys announced that day, you're all in on Flash. Billion dollar investments. Mills has made a few billion dollar investments in his day. So he's got some street cred in that regard. So tell me, what's happened since April 11th? What's the uptake been like? Share with us what's going on in the pipeline. You know, that was the start of a real huge uptake from a client perspective. Really talking about what Flash is and how it's going to advance businesses around the world. So we're seeing clients come to us with all different types of challenges that they're facing right now that they think can be fed and satisfied with the Flash retail, for example. We're working with a retail client that the Flash technology allows them to look at what's going on in a store and predict if shoplifting's going to happen before it takes place. Can you imagine what that's going to mean from a business to cut down costs? So it's not about the cost per gigabyte. It's about how do I change my business? It's not just the technology. It's the benefits and the solutions. And Sebastian was on talking about the solution side as one of the pillars of the strategy. And there's so many solutions. Shoplifting for retail, you have a construction. We talked to the construction company, CIO. Internet of Things is upon us, mobile. So there's a variety of different solutions. How do you guys enable that and how do you guys engage that with the solutions? I mean, as they're morphing in real time, what's your view on that and what are you hearing from customers that you need to do to deliver those solutions? So, you know, solutions are really about what's the power of the technology behind it. And to be able to do that for any particular client, you have to understand that industry. So we're very good at having industry-specific experts that understand what is a client ultimately trying to do and then marry that with the technology, using IBM technology to analyze slices of brain tumors out of children. The speed at which we can get those answers back with our technology that then feeds the right medicine to that child, their survival rate goes up 10-fold. So how do you view that operational efficiency? So, you know, openness, as you referenced here earlier, is key in the technology going forward. You know, we have always been on the forefront of being open. If you look back 10 years ago when we started virtualization, we didn't hinge that just on IBM storage in the background, but any technology company that had the hardware could work in that virtualized environment and we've not changed. So we feel bringing in the breadth and the knowledge of companies that have things to contribute is really what's going to help clients solve their problems. Eventually you want to turn storage into an API. It's a platform, it's not a box for a particular use case. It's services that you invoke. How does that message resonate with clients? Do they just say, ah, that sounds good, but just give me the box? Or are they actually thinking about that transformation? Oh, absolutely. I mean, that's where they're headed. They don't want to think about the box anymore. They don't want to have to put together these complex solutions to get ultimately the service level agreements for their clients or what they're looking to do in their environment. So, you know, using technology like OpenStack, going into the cloud type technology, being able to leverage the technology that's there without having to put tons of resources in it to put it together. That's where it's at. How tuned in do you feel like that clients are to the transformations that are happening, not in technology, but in their industries as a result of technology and will they accelerate their adoption of newer technologies like Flash or like Software Defined sooner than they have historically? I think clients are very aware of how fast technology is changing and what that means to their bottom line and their business. I think they're a bit panicked right now to really understand what do they need to do to get there. And this is where we come in, whether it's consultative services, whether it's taking the knowledge of working with clients in the industry, but they're hungry and they're coming to us saying, help me. What I ultimately want to do, help me get there. Are you spinning DJ internally in IBM? How do you guys bring that together? Because that's a key advantage of vertical focus and the other business units. So as a storage person, you now have to, you know, Switzerland, if you will, how do you handle that internally and solve customer problems from that? So, you know, a couple of things that you brought up here, I'll work backwards internally in IBM. You know, we have groups that work together where it's the cloud groups or big data analytic groups. We have flavors of the industry verticals that are added in there, but we're really changing the way that we work with an IBM. You know, one of the arguments and people like yourself, Dave, told us you guys are too siloed across the business. We're changing. And we're working across the different business units more from a solutions perspective than really about the technology itself. So, how does that conversation go with customers? Why should they buy the IBM hardware versus somebody else's hardware? Or in what situations do they, you know, maintain some of the other hardware versus your hardware? So, you know, if you take what we have with the virtualization software, the SBC Frameworks software that runs our V7000, we have things like thin provisioning and other what are considered to be enterprise class functionality adopted onto the mid-range type devices that a client can leverage. But they can also take that software and put it on hardware. And it's typically with a third party that then doing something unique with that software, that for a particular vertical or industry brings value and specifically what that client wants. Thank you, Laura. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Two days live, cause we'll be right back after this short break. This is SiliconANGLE, we'll be back on theCUBE. Right back.