Businesses of all sizes are in a race with competitors to digitize, use data to improve marketing and build advanced applications that satisfy customer demands. Companies could lose customers to another business simply because they’re running a better mobile application. This is why it’s crucial for businesses to focus on up-the-stack software and application problems and outsource the plumbing to someone else, according to Drew Dimmick, product management lead of native hybrid cloud at EMC.

Enterprises need to differentiate from competition, and, “You’re not going to do that by building a better server or hyperconverged environment with a network underneath it,” Dimmick told Brian Gracely (@bgracely), cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during EMC World 2016. “You’re going to do that by building more engaging applications, more engaging customer interactions with those applications,” he said.

Considering human capital

James Watters, SVP of products at Pivotal Software, Inc., also joined the interview. He said that a company can easily grasp the value of moving up the stack just by considering their human capital.

“That technical talent is so scarce, and so we have a very simple argument,” he said, referring to how Pivotal sells its cloud infrastructure. “You can have your smartest people figuring out how to configure operating systems, or you can have them shipping code. Like, what’s going to drive your business?”

Containers catching fire

Watters said he sees two ways people are approaching application containers. One is, “Let’s just take your legacy and try to put it into a container to say, ‘Hey, I did something new.'”

He said in that case, containers are “fools gold” because they don’t do much to reduce complexity of processing. “So where we see people being really successful is at code level change to microservices,” he said. “Just grabbing a container and putting some legacy code in it doesn’t give you the benefit of Netflix’s operating model.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of EMC World 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE