 This is Dave Vellante at wikibond.org, it's a wall production, we're here at IBM Edge 2013, live from Las Vegas, Jamie Thomas and Matt Hogstrom are here. Jamie is the GM of Software-Defined Systems for IBM and Matt is the CTO of Software-Defined Environments and first of all welcome folks. Let me maybe Matt go to you. How do you guys look at Software-Defined Storage? How do you define Software-Defined Storage? We're hearing a little bit of a unique angle from IBM this week, but give us your perspective. What is it? Well, you know, if I start at the Software-Defined and I stop there, I think that the big shift that we've had over the past probably about six years is we're now at a point of having programmable infrastructure, right? So virtualization was always a means to consolidate and to be efficient, etc. But now it's turned into I can create infrastructure on demand programmatically. So the consumer is now driving a lot of the infrastructure. So we should talk about integrating those capabilities. I presume I'm referring again, that's part of your charter. So are you running a development organization and how do you tap into that resource? Yes, so today my role is not only strategic, but I'm managing thousands of programmers within the context of our team. And what we're doing as an execution team is we have experts across these domains, Matt being one of those experts, who are working together right now to define not only what are we doing today, because we have things that we're announcing this week, but the next generation of capabilities and experiments we need to run working with our clients to further refine this, because we don't think we're going to do this just in a pure laboratory setting without interaction with clients with these experiments. Well, typically what we all end up doing when we have expertise in a given area, right, we tend to stay in that silo. And so whether I'm talking about storage or compute networking, even if I'm talking about governments or operating systems, all organizations have kind of silos. And the silos are where the people spend their time. And so what the software defined environment does is it allows us to not look from the bottom up. Like when someone says I need storage, we kind of inherently know it's fast over there or this is the connectivity that I have, but it's really from the top down. So now the people in the silos have to be much more aware of the needs of the developers and the other groups that are bringing applications into the infrastructure. So the shift is away from the discrete pieces and looking at it as a holistic top. Jamie, can you talk about what you sort of learned in your years of software development and sort of how you see that translating into this traditionally box-based hardware world? How do you see that transition occurring? Well, today with the audience, I shared an example from the web world, which I was in the middle of about 10 years ago with WebSphere in a big way. And what we saw there was this dichotomy between application development teams attempting to move at web speed with new processes, new innovation, new standards. And you saw the gridlock, and maybe not gridlock is too harsh of a word, but certainly an interaction pain model with the operations team who had to command and support these SLA agreements while also knitting back into that traditional transactional environment, right? So you had a clash of cultures. And what we had to do is really fundamentally take steps to enable us to be successful both with the innovation and the ability to integrate that innovation back into those existing systems, which at the time were the transaction systems around CICS and IMS and things like that, right? This shift is similar to that in some ways, but I think moving even at a more rapid pace. The premise is that it actually could happen faster here. So that comes back to, that's a putting a lot of trust in my software-defined environment. Well, I think one of the key things that Matt can comment on this further is our view is that we can encapsulate software patterns, which we've done today in the context of our peer systems. We've definitely implemented patterns there. But the next C change is the encapsulation of infrastructure patterns. Where we're able to capture infrastructure as code in a way that we haven't been able to do before. A lot of the automation around infrastructure today is in the form of scripts. This is about being able to capture a definition of the infrastructure and use that knowledge to actually help us execute in this environment. I don't know if you've had one. We've got priorities that you have. What should observers be watching as indicators of progress, of success, of value creation for your operation? Well, I think that first and foremost, we want to try to be much more open about our plans and where we're going as a part of this journey because we think that's absolutely critical in today's environment. We cannot simply understand every use case or certainly dream those up in the context of the laboratory. You can expect to see us as a very visible player continuing in open stack and open daylight in terms of what we're doing there as a foundation of software-defined environments as well as a foundation for software-defined networking. We in fact are announcing a software-defined network controller this week in addition to the work that we're announcing to integrate our storage products with the open stack APIs. Our goal is to be able to, with our customers, to be able to say, here's what we expect to have in six months from now and here's what we expect to have even a year from now, just to start the stimulated conversation, if you will, about what we're thinking about because we think that this is going to need to be a very interactive model to really be successful. Yeah, well, I mean, you guys know the open source game, you know how to play that. You've had a lot of successes there and I think Ambuja was right. He said that we can't do it alone. We've got to, and openness is the key to being able to foster that innovation. So I would imagine there'll be a lot more developers here next year. There are some here. Yeah, I think so. I think so. Great. All right, Jamie and Matt, I really appreciate you guys coming to the queue. Thanks for having us. Great segment. Good luck. We'll be watching. I'm really excited for you guys and excited for the transformation that's going on in the business. Thank you. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be right back with our next guest. This is the Cube. This is SiliconANGLE's coverage of Edge. We'll be right back.