The very nature of enterprise data is changing, and the cloud is driving a wave of disruption through the technology industry, says Sujal Patel, founder of scalable, clustered storage  system developer Isilon. As a result, he told Wikibon.org Co-Founder David Vellante and SiliconAngle Founder John Furrier on a SiliconAngle.tv webcast from EMCworld 2011, new opportunities abound.

When he founded Isilon in 2001 the market for storage systems for really large data sets was mainly in the entertainment industry, storing electronic media. A couple of years later a new niche market appeared in genetic sequencing. Today virtually every large enterprise is working with huge amounts of unstructured data of one kind or another, often to feed analysis that drives their corporate value. In another 10 years, 90% of business data will be unstructured and it will have grown 50-fold. “So how do you adapt infrastructures to handle that avalanche of data?” he asks.

The data sets are becoming so huge, he says, that centralizing them becomes impractical – you have to work with them wherever they are created. So the question becomes how to leverage technologies like virtualization first to give the applications access to the data and later to take the next step to integrate the application and data closely.

He says that his experience as a part of EMC since the Isilon acquisition four months ago has been excellent. EMC has acquired about 60 smaller companies over its history and has  great deal of experience with integrating them while allowing them to continue developing down their own paths. As the largest storage company in the industry, it provides Isilon with the greatest range of storage products to operate across and of course access to the large EMC customer base.

EMC, he says, could make a strong business out of selling multiple best-of-breed products as stand-alone appliances to solve specific customer pain-points. But he things EMC actually has a much larger opportunity to integrate all those products to create a unified, highly advanced, coherent platform. “That opportunity absolutely is in front of us, and we have a great shot at executing on that opportunity.”