In this episode of The New Stack Analysts podcast, captured at VMworld 2014 in San Francisco, Alex Williams and Virtustream's Chairman & CEO Rodney J. Rogers discuss innovation and competition in the Infrastructure as a Service utility marketplace.

Rogers and CTO Kevin Reid founded Virtustream, a venture-backed company, in January, 2009. Admiring the elasticity and economics of the core, multi-tenant architecture that AWS has made its market, Virtustream's founders focused on Fortune 500 customers with a view to building a software product having a rich set of enterprise features, that services as a provisioning, management and orchestration layer to run a fully-functional cloud system.

Alongside enterprise stalwarts such as HP and IBM, the big players in the market - AWS, Google and Microsoft - are investing $1B per quarter in infrastructure. For a company such as Virtustream, then, architecture must provide the scalability raison d'etre. Surmounting the performance and security challenges of virtualization, Virtustream takes their abstracting approach into existing environments, generally to optimize for speed and efficiency, but ultimately to control IOPS, and therefore control throughput. This enables service level agreements that go beyond promises of infrastructure availability, allowing Virtustream to offer commercial SLAs based on application performance standards.

Rogers suggests it's the top of the fourth inning of the customer-vendor relationship, and the push is on. Rogers' and Williams' analysis and insights on the current state and future of the industry cover many topics, including hybrid, containerization and the burden of operations.