Cloud computing and big data are driving the storage industry more than ever, but not every cloud is created equal, said EMC Chairman and CEO during a Tuesday keynote presentation at the Intel Capital Global Summit.

During his time on stage, which was a question-and-answer session with Cory Johnson, an editor with Bloomberg Television, Tucci also touched on the importance of partnering, including working closely with potential competitors.

The Intel Capital Global Summit, held this week in Huntington Beach, Calif., is an annual event that brings companies in which Intel Capital has invested together with potential investors, customers and partners.

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Tucci's appearance at the Intel Capital Global Summit was his second public appearance for the day after flying to the event directly from giving a keynote at Oracle World in which he discussed the opportunities related to big data.

Tucci said that cloud computing has been talked about for years. But in the last couple years, it has become an important IT driver as people saw the success of Google's cloud offerings. EMC is looking at how to take the technologies Google used to build its cloud to other cloud providers and to customers looking to build private clouds, he said.

However, Tucci said, Amazon Web Services is a better model of how the cloud is being built. Unlike Google, Microsoft, Facebook and many others who built a cloud infrastructure specific to their own applications, Amazon Web Services was built to make any applications available to thousands of users.

"[Google and Microsoft] are tuning the infrastructure for their own apps," he said. "Amazon tuned their infrastructure to run any app."

Big data, which Tucci described as technology that lets a company glean business insight from structured and unstructured data from its own sources, partner sources and public sources, is also driving the growth of the storage business.

For example, he cited the case of an insurance company that traditionally based its auto insurance rates on a driver's age, driving experience and number of tickets accrued. However, new cars are now collecting a lot of data related to its location, speed and so on that can be used to adjust rates, with a driver speeding through a 25-miles-per-hour zone paying more than a safer driver.

NEXT: The Importance Of Partnering, Even With Rivals

Insurance companies will eventually adopt such a system, and give customers the chance to opt out, although such customers will likely pay higher rates. "It's coming," EMC's Tucci said.

The heart of EMC's strategy is to build the technology that will allow businesses to build software-defined data centers, a strategy that depends very much on partnerships, he said.

Such a strategy will make it possible to pool compute, storage and networking resources in such a way that they present a consistent infrastructure to applications. Those applications would tell the infrastructure what service-level agreement, security and data retention policies, and performance it needs, and the infrastructure would respond by providing it, he said.

For that strategy to work, EMC must remain open to partnering, Tucci said. That includes partnering with potential rivals such as Oracle, where he said the approach to cloud computing is focused more on building infrastructure specific to that company's applications, he said. "If you don't leave room for others to be successful and prosper, why would they partner with us," he said.

Partnering on many fronts is important to EMC, a company that is focused much more on product development than on services, Tucci said.

"The hallmark of a successful company in IT is you gotta partner," he said. "And we tell our services partners, here, you do it. And we take our precious resources and invest them in product development."

PUBLISHED OCT. 2, 2012