 Live from the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, California, it's the queue at Oracle Open World 2014. Brought to you by headline sponsor Q-Logic with support from HGST, violin memory, and MarkLogic. Now here is your host, Stu Miniman. Welcome back to SiliconANGLE TV's live continuous coverage from Oracle Open World 2014. Here from Moscone South, San Francisco, California. Three days of live broadcast. We've got two cubes rocking. I'm here in the Q-Logic booth, Stu Miniman with wikibon.org. It's a who's who in the industry event. Everybody from Mike Krigsman who's walking by the cube here to our live studio. Matthew, you want to bring them in for a minute? You have a minute to join us on set? We're live on air. So we'd love to get your quick set. We've had lots of industry watchers and everything. One of the things we love about the cube going live is we can do some of these things a little bit ad hoc. So while Michael's getting mic'd up here to join me on the set, let's talk a minute about Oracle's keynote this morning. Actually he's ready to go. So Michael, hey, I appreciate you. Stu, great to see you. Yeah Stu. We've got the Q-Logic booth and then down the aisle we've got the Cisco booth. We had Ray Wang over there yesterday giving us some of our insights. So love about this show is the people you get to see. So while I say at this 65,000 person show, there's actually less people that I know as an infrastructure guy than some of the other shows. So what brings you Oracle Open World? What's exciting you? What have you been saying? Well I tell you, you know what's really interesting was to watch Larry Ellison yesterday, the new chief technology officer. And you could see he's in his element. He loves talking about databases. And I wonder whether or not Mark Hurd is kind of signaling a warmer, friendlier, happier Oracle. Oh my God. I don't believe it. You know, come on, Larry, follow the art of war that I will kill my competitor. They're still up there bashing some of the competition on the stage. The term that I heard this morning over and over again is Oracle builds the right solution and everything else is generic infrastructure. Sure. I don't expect to see a warmer and fuzzier Oracle. Well, let me ask you this. So who's the boss now? So Larry's still the boss. Larry's the chairman. But yeah, right in his keynote yesterday he talked about the fact that, oh, nobody's reporting to him anymore and he can just work on the technology. And I think he likes geeking out on it. I mean, Larry is one of the special people in technology, really understands the technology. Gives off that kind of geeky humor which those of us in the technology space really can respect even if we don't love Larry. But Mark Hurd is a sales guy and a sales guy has to love the customer and love the message and you know, be a little bit more warm and fuzzy. So can I push back on you a little bit about that? Well, yeah, so you use that term love a lot. If looking at the technology world we fall out of love pretty easily. In the old days, you know, people loved IBM for like 40 years. We loved Microsoft for like 20 years. Think we loved Apple for like 10 years. Google for like two years. So it's really easy to fall out of love. So can you really love, you know, an IT company? Well, let's, all right, so let's back off. You got me there. Let's back off from love and let's just say that it's possible that Oracle will adopt a pragmatic approach for the cloud age because the tone, the style, and the culture of the cloud is different from the on-prem world. All right, so great point. I want to get your viewpoint on something because if I look at, you know, kind of the inside circle of the cloud on Twitter, it's like, oh, you know, Oracle's a couple of years behind. They're just now talking about infrastructure servers and platform and service. So give us real quick your take. You know, does Oracle have what it takes to compete in the world of cloud, mobile, social and big data? There's no doubt that Oracle is lagging behind. However, at the same time, think about their core customer base. Their customers are CIOs. And these CIOs are not necessarily at the advanced vanguard of adopting social because it's cool. They have to respond to what their users want. And so if users want mobile and users want cloud, the CIO has to follow behind. And so from that standpoint, you know, we as analysts, we talk, you know, oh, Oracle is behind and everything else. But does Oracle really care about that? They care about satisfying their customers. Yeah, I think that's a great point. The point I made yesterday in one of our analysis segments was if they're two years behind where the bleeding edge is, they're still ahead of 95% of the customers out there. And that's what they care about. Yeah, absolutely. So focus on the customers, deliver what they need. Hey, Michael, I appreciate it. I know you've got to run back there. I'm going to keep going with some of my intro. Thank you so much for having me. Absolutely. So if I can keep talking a little bit about the keynote this morning, John Fowler talked about Oracle Systems Business and what those of us in the industry like to call the red stack. So you talk about a vertically integrated stack. Of course, Oracle starts with the application and they own what sits at the database. And as they drive down, all the way down to the various hardware components. So after the sun acquisition with the sun spark, they've got storage components from sun. They've got networking components that through some of what they did with sun as well, they've got investments in Mellanox and through some partnerships. Oracle owns so many pieces of the stack and what they try to deliver on is, of course, giving the best performance, best reliability and the most simple solution for their customers. And the conversation I was having with some people is if you are bought into the Oracle stack, of course, you are going to get a lot of benefit. It is easier to use and as David Fowler, Wikibon CTO has said, as we integrate up the stack, the further up the stack we go, there's exponentially more value and it allows me to handle my environment a lot with a lot less people. So if I buy a full Exadata solution, my IT really needs to just focus on the application itself. And I don't have to worry as much about tweaking the infrastructure underneath it and one of the greatest sins that we've had in IT today is building bespoke architectures with way too many geek knobs and IT spends so much time just trying to get a little bit more out of the infrastructure and keep it up and running and it's that constant treadmill of I need to patch it, it did it break, does it meet what I need and Oracle wants to remove a lot of those challenges by just saying, hey, here's the full solution, just roll in the rack, going to manage it real simply. But of course, to be able to do that if it's all Oracle components requires a ton of R&D and even though Oracle probably, Oracle has the most complete stack out there, they can't do it all. So for example, we're sitting here in the QLogic booth, QLogic is supplier for the fiber channel components in the storage array, they're the front end ports, in the host array, they're the adapter ports, so it's never that I'm going to be able to do it all myself. Of course, Oracle has partnerships with Intel, so they do plenty of x86, they don't just do Spark, so it's never that Oracle can do it all alone and as I look at things like Moore's Law and I look at the growth of open source and commodity components, I find it hard to see how Oracle can continue to build on so many different pieces that just require huge amount of resources, the merchant silicon components just get so much more volume and open source gets the leverage of everyone working on it, so it's difficult for Oracle to be able to maintain leadership in all of those different components and while they can get a premium for putting it all together and delivering a simple solution and owning the full stack, you can play a little bit of games as to where the revenue comes from and where it goes in the business but it's tough to keep that going. Definitely something that we continue to look at, make sure that users are getting the simplicity that they need as well as not being raked over the calls for licensing or being squeezed too much on pricing and of course, if you have complete control of the stack you have a lot of leverage over the customers, so. Lots of things we want to dig in and the rest of our coverage here at Oracle OpenWorld, talking plenty more about what's going on in cloud, the network, the application and database world, plenty of big data going on. I'm Stu Miniman with Wikibon, go to siliconangle.tv as always to see our current events, past events, where the cube's going to be. If you're ever at these events, we love you to come check us out in person, always looking to get feedback from the community and there's lots of research going on wikibon.org and all of the news coverage on siliconangle.com, so. That's the intro segment here from day three, wall to wall coverage from Oracle OpenWorld. We'll be right back with our next guest after this quick break.