Las Vegas: EMC is hoping that its ViPR storage platform will catch the attention of third-party vendors who want to integrate their products.

Speaking to V3 at the EMC World conference, president of advanced software Amitabh Srivastava said that the company was seeking to build an ecosystem around ViPR rather than keep the platform closed off as an entirely proprietary offering. The company is seeking to balance its open approach while still offering a focused enterprise platform.

“The public cloud did try to solve this problem but they simplified it substantially, they homogenised,” said.

“If you are really going to build a system for the enterprise, you have to go and really tackle the hard problems of storage.”

Unveiled by the company earlier in the day, ViPR aims to provide a software-defined storage platform which can manage storage clouds both on-premise and remotely. The platform will support both EMC’s own storage appliances and those offered by outside vendors.

Srivastava said that the company also hopes its offering will catch the imaginations of firms who will find new ways to integrate with their own products.

“We are going to open up the APIs,” he said,”anyone can build the adaptor, you are not at our mercy in any way.

“We want to really build an ecosystem where anyone can do it.”

In addition to supporting storage appliances, the company is also working to get ViPR on emerging platforms, such as HDFS and cloud computing initiatives with OpenStack integration. While service providers are the obvious early target for ViPR. Srivastava noted that the platform could also help some of the smallest vendors bring their own products to market.

“It is a great tool for startups, because startups have all these cool ideas, but now they don’t have to worry about all the grungy details of how you manage these arrays,” he explained.

“These startups can come in and build right on top of ViPR.”