Clod Barrera, the chief technical strategist for IBM’s storage group, stopped by theCube at the recently concluded Edge 2013 conference to share his take on the bleeding edge technologies that are disrupting IT.

TheCube host Dave Vellante mentions that the convergence of flash, metadata, and other trends is driving an unprecedented rate of innovation. Berrera agrees. The way he sees it, flash is transforming the data center from the bottom up, starting with the way data is stored and accessed.

Metadata is another big game changer. The executive perceives it as the key to extracting value from information that can’t be sorted effectively using traditional means.

“You create easily searchable information to layer on top of information that is not easily searchable. If you do annotation, and someone has to do the annotation, either automatically or a human, you now have data about data and you can use that when it’s time to find the thing you want.”

Software-defined storage is also making data more accessible for enterprises. Barrera says that abstracting the underlying hardware is only the first phase in the evolution of SDS – the next step is applying a cloud operating model to storage environments.

“The next step might be being able to dynamically create instances of that storage asset. So not only do I have this homogenous abstraction, but if I decide right now I need a little more bandwidth or change the quality of service it’s providing, I can do that. “

What does the future hold for storage? Barrera predicts that object stores will gain traction thanks to their ease of use and simplified architecture. Organizations can leverage these databases to let mobile device holders “reach” into the cloud and access objects – apps and data – more conveniently than before.

See the video below for the full interview.