Enterprise IT teams need to break their habit of buying packaged solutions from big vendors and turn to commodity hardware and open source in order to drive innovation and become real partners to the business.

That was the key message in a provocative keynote delivered by Peyton Maynard-Koran, senior director of worldwide infrastructure at Whole Foods/Amazon at Interop ITX on Wednesday. A technologist with extensive experience in networking and infrastructure, Maynard-Koran kicked off the day by looking at the state of enterprise IT and offering his view on how it can transform in the cloud era.

"IT has to change. We are at the moment where we have all the tools and capabilities that allow us to start reinventing ourselves, our teams, and become a true partner to the businesses we support," he said. "We can start driving innovation to our businesses. We can help them move faster."

[Read more of Marcia Savage's report from Peyton Maynard-Koran's keynote presentationn on Network Computing.]