The next time you are negotiating a six-figure salary with a new developer, you might pause and wonder if you could just use free customer feedback to get the same value. One company has found that simply observing how customers interact with products is all it takes to build the next-generation release.

Manuvir Das, SVP of the Advanced Software Division at EMC, said that the general IT community using its open-source offerings have helped them conceive and improve its services. He told Stu Miniman (@stu) and Brian Gracely (@bgracely), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during EMC World 2016, “If you take the customers where you want to go, it will work out in the end.”

Das said that  EMC’s  open-source CoprHD (pronounced “copperhead”) was basically born out of community feedback on another open-source product, ViPR Controller. “If you look at the decisions we actually made, the way we did the licensing, all of that, we’ve done it as open as could possibly be,” he said. “So, yeah, somebody could take this and monetize it tomorrow. And good for them.”

Keeping options open in the cloud

Das spoke with hosts about the challenges of competing with public cloud providers like Amazon.

He claimed that EMC’s Virtustream can offer a “more dedicated hybrid model where customers have some equipment on-premise, some in the service provider’s data center, and it opens up some opportunities that you cannot get from a pure public cloud.”

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