With companies of all sizes working feverishly to discover the next opportunity for innovation, standing out in the digital transformation era poses an increasing challenge. As cloud complexities plague businesses across industries, IBM is working to simplify the burdens of storage and enable more streamlined compute capabilities for customers.

“Technology transform and modernize is a massive program for us and our customers right now. … [It’s] about reduction of risk, reduction of cost, and allowing to transfer operational skins to new workloads and prepare for the cloud,” said Shaun Coulson (pictured), vice president of storage solutions sales, Europe, at IBM Corp.

Coulson spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Cisco Live event in Barcelona, Spain. They discussed how IBM’s improved storage strategy is helping streamline cloud computing processes for customers complying with a range of guidelines across the world. (* Disclosure below.)

Streamlined options for customers of every size

Smooth digital transformation is the goal for competitive businesses in every industry, and IBM is working with its customers to help usher them into an era of modernization. “Everybody’s talking about cloud. The main driver is how do they prepare for cloud, and that’s a hybrid solution,” Coulson said.

IBM works with companies at a range of cloud adoption levels to developing transformative strategies. “There are a lot of customers that for security or financial regulation reasons are never going to be that far down the track in cloud. … There’s opportunity for everybody, and that’s … where we have the skillset to help our customers going forward,” he said.

IBM’s varied customer base requires a range of solutions to help them reach their goal of simplicity. Coulson relayed the story of one customer, a Nordic financial institution, that found particular success with IBM’s flash offering. “The UCS server stack and network from Cisco allowed them to move some of their resources, reducing their cost,” he said. With the introduction of IBM’s system, the company was able to reduce its process time from five days to two, with a team a quarter of the size.

The increasing affordability of flash is a major benefit for customer accessibility, according to Coulson. “In the fourth quarter, we saw more core flash modules than we did revenue-wise on traditional SSDs, which is a kind of indication of where we’ve gone with the price performance,” he said.

Looking ahead, Coulson is confident that the industry will follow in the footsteps of smaller organizations leading the charge in data transformation. “[They] have more agility, they’re actually leading in terms of being willing to put their first foot forward. … Once that is proven, the larger organizations come in and work it,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Cisco Live Barcelona 2018. (* Disclosure: IBM sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither IBM nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE