 Hi everybody, we're back. This is Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org and this is the spotlight on the high performance data center and I'm here with David Nicholson who heads up the Intel EMC Alliance. David, welcome back to theCUBE. Thanks, great to be here. Saw you at VMworld a few weeks ago, about a month ago now. Yes. Great event, different vibe than what we have here at Oracle Open World, isn't it? Yeah, it is different. It's not just the difference in numbers but I think it's a difference in the vibe between Vegas and San Francisco. Has a lot to do with it. Well, let's see, were you at VMworld last year? Yes. And were you at Open World last year? Yes. Okay, so there was still a different vibe even though they were both in this building. Yeah, yeah, this is true, this is true. And you know, but let's talk about that for a minute because VMworld is, it's kumbaya, it's ecosystem, it's for every dollar spent on VMware licensed 17 or 15 or whatever it is that's spent in the ecosystem and there's a lot of good feeling and there's a newness and a real energy around that. You don't hear that same kind of talk here. Yeah, it's a little different. A lot of business being done. Absolutely. No doubt about it. Absolutely. Fantastic. Good stuff, but it's just not as open at Open World. No, it is interesting, some of my colleagues and I were joking that Oracle Open World has become much like the North Korean Freedom Festival in some ways. I think that there was quite a contrast was on display when you take a look at EMC's keynote with Pat Gelsinger and Joe Tucci up on stage with Chad painting a picture of an open world where architecture can have things like Oracle and other applications running against it followed by Oracle's vision of the world which had a lot of exas in front of it, exa, vis, and exa that. Yeah, we got a mega dose of exa. Yes, we did. In fact, if you go to Moscone West hanging from the ceiling, Larry Ellison has his exa dingy. It's quite an impressive piece of kit. Yeah, the exa dingy. I love it. Probably bigger than most people's boats. So, but let's talk about that because openness is in the eye of the beholder. So, what is open to EMC and you run the Intel Alliance? What's open to EMC and Intel? So, we're looking at a platform that, and Pat Gelsinger talks about this very, very frequently and eloquently. We're looking at a proliferation of x86 architecture, Intel architecture in general, a more ubiquitous nature as flash becomes increasingly important in the storage realm, and of course a virtualization layer. And that virtualization layer generally EMC is going to talk about VMware, but truly we're talking about hypervisors of all flavors and stripes. So, think about a horizontally arranged hardware stack that allows you to bring any application to that stack in a private cloud, in a public cloud, and then linking those two environments together, this concept of the hybrid cloud. So, the hardware stack is independent of the application layer. Whereas, in the case of Oracle, it's not. Exactly. Okay, but couldn't you argue, in narrowly, that exologic for example, is a horizontal infrastructure layer for Oracle apps, across the Oracle application portfolio? Yes. So, they take that concept to a point. You're saying you take that further. Yes, further. So, if you only run Oracle software in your enterprise, then Exa Pick Your Flavor can represent open architecture. Most of our customers, and when I say our, I'm talking about Intel and EMC, most of our customers run application environments in addition to Oracle. So, we are extending that. Now, let me say there is, certainly it makes sense when you look at optimizing software and hardware to work together, and Intel and EMC are trying to do that, as best as possible, to address a broader portfolio of applications aside from Oracle's environments. Yeah, engineering hardware and software together, which is the Oracle mantra, it makes sense. There's some benefits of doing that. Sure. It's interesting to note that exologic, exolytics, exadata, it's Intel inside there. Absolutely. We saw some T4 announcements this week, and for those customers that don't necessarily want to move, I guess that's the solution, but Intel really is taking over the data center world for all except a few workloads that are, the scale up, I don't know what percent of the market is, but it's probably less than 20. Intel really has won. I mean, even inside of storage arrays now, like the VMAX for example. Absolutely, we've standardized all of our architecture on Intel, that was about a decade long process. And that is true. And yes, yeah, there are Xeon processors inside the various EGSA products, but when we talk about X86 and Intel architecture, I'm really referring to that open architecture that isn't necessarily tied to something. Some piece of hardware. That Oracle sells, yeah. Yeah, okay. So again, I want to get back to this notion of open, because open systems was the watchword in the 80s and it took down companies like Prime and Wang and DG and even digital, right? Ken Olson's famous line about UNIX's snake oil. Sure. UNIX was open, and now UNIX is closed. Right. So, Linux is open, right? So you have this sort of evolving platform, evolving nomenclature. Ultimately, what makes things open is the entries and the exits into that system, I guess, or open source, if you want to just open source everything, but then it's harder to make money. Yeah. Red Hat's done an okay job of it, but generally speaking, it's harder to make money. So there's a fine line there, right? So talk a little bit about how you get into and out of those environments and what that means and is there a development community effort going on there? Yeah, sure there is. We actually work very closely with something called the Open Data Center Alliance and the Open Data Center Alliance is providing guidance. It's about 300 customers, IT shops, that are providing their input, kind of guiding what open architecture or cloud architecture will look like in the future. So, open architecture, I guess, shouldn't be confused with open systems or any flavor of UNIX or any operating system in particular. It's more the idea that the hardware infrastructure can support virtual machines, whether they are VMware, Citrix, Hyper-V, virtual machines, those should be transparently movable between different areas in the stack. So I guess it really begs the question about just how proprietary is your software stack in that architecture? And we see proprietary as really indicating the idea that it's something that's worth paying for. So if we can provide a value add and if people stay with our architecture because they see a value instead of staying because of the pain of movement, then we feel like we've won. And there's a big difference there. Oracle would say the same thing that you just said, right? We add value, but the inference I just made from what you said is a lot of customers have no choice. Yeah, I would think that, yes, this is true. I did note sort of a sense that some of the folks, the customer references that were shown, there was like fear in the eyes of some of those references. Sensing that. Yeah, people are afraid of Oracle. There's no doubt about it. Did you see the exit dinghy? It's a menacing black, kind of pirate ship-ish sort of thing. But it's true though, customers are afraid, partners are afraid, employees, you know. Oracle is the 800-pound gorilla. And you can't argue that, in fact, there is a great message there when it comes to integrating hardware and software. And for some, the exit products do offer a value. Again, we just go back to this idea that outside of the Oracle universe, there are plenty of applications that need to be managed as well. So I want to come back to choice. And how do you respond to somebody who says, okay, I hear you, Dave. You guys are more open. Intel, Cisco, the whole VCE thing. VMware is fundamental to a V-block. If I want to put Hyper-V in a V-block, I can't. So how do you respond to those? Well, that's very exadata, exa-like. That's closed, isn't it? Sure. Well, what we really do is we offer a range of options. So VCE would be the pre-packaged variant of an open architecture where certain decisions about the components, those decisions have already been made. But we have plenty of customers who will substitute the Cisco part of the VCE infrastructure with Brocade. Substitute the UCS Cisco part of the server infrastructure with Dell or HP. It's just not a V-block. It's just not a V-block. Yeah, by definition, the V-block includes certain types of components. But we do architectures that are very similar with other hardware. So essentially you're saying it's not just about the products that you design and take to market. It's about the business practices and adjacent solutions that you build. Exactly. So that's sort of a big component, I guess, of Open. Again, it's this moving, fuzzy thing, but you kind of know it when you see it. Yeah, absolutely. It'll be interesting to see what happens over the next several years. I mean, I think that this is going to be a very, very interesting period in the history of IT. There are some who look at Oracle very clearly attempting to become the Apple for Enterprise IT, and they see an opportunity for great success. I think there's a lot of room in the world for both versions at this point. A more open architecture and the closed architectures that they're talking about. I think the difference that we've observed on theCUBE this week is that the whole consumerization trend, consumerization of IT hasn't seeped into Oracle's space yet. Not yet. It's extremely complicated. I mean, you come from a, EMC comes from a complicated world, and I know you're working hard to simplify a lot of the things that you do, but that consumerization of IT is a big step that Oracle has to take and others in the Enterprise to get to Apple-like simplicity, don't you think? Yeah, yeah, I would agree completely. We're not quite there yet. Yeah, so it's interesting to see the whole way that dynamic has shifted, that consumers are really driving a lot of the innovation. We saw it with Flash. We're seeing it in so many ways. Certainly, simplicity, cloud. I guess we can learn a lot from that. I, as a small business person, sometimes feel like I have better IT than I used to when I was at a big company. Well, I thought there was actually an IDF, another show a little while ago. The CEO of Intel presented a great story, and that story began with this idea that the user is the center of the compute world, and that user's experience is going to be driven, is going to drive, I should say, the way that IT infrastructure will be deployed moving forward. And because folks like us have talked about cloud and IT as a service for so long and so often, we get this idea that it is upon us when in fact most of these workloads are still working in traditional data center environments just like they have for the last decade. So this trend has not yet really flowed over us when it comes to IT as a service. And I think it's going to be interesting. It'll be interesting to see how some of these exologic exadata, exolytics products stand up when IT as a service becomes truly prevalent. I think it's a really important point you're making, and you're familiar with the words going on, war words between Benioff and Ellison sort of started last year at Open World. Larry doesn't get it, cloud doesn't run on the box. Oh, what do you think it runs on? It runs on 1,500 Dell server boxes, that whole thing back and forth. And that was kind of interesting. And in a way, they're both right. Larry technically is correct that the cloud is databases and microprocessors and software in a data center. But to the point that you just made, cloud is as much about the user experience as anything else. And it's a philosophy around that user experience. So what is EMC's philosophy around cloud specifically and compare that with some of the others, Oracle or other folks that you see out there that might be cloud washing? So I think right now, really we're focused on the journey, which sounds like a loose marketing term, but truly it's- Well, it is a marketing term. Yeah, of course it is. But it is, it's also an exciting journey. Well, as long as you can define the steps on that journey. And we think we've done a pretty good job of that, because what it starts with is the idea that first you need to ready your infrastructure that lives in traditional data center environments by creating this concept of the private cloud. So by abstracting and virtualizing workloads in their data, creating infrastructure that allows you to transport workloads along with applications, then you can start considering moving those workloads into the public space where you have this concept of the hybrid cloud moving from the private cloud to the public cloud. So we also see this world where the end user is in the driver's seat. The end user brings whatever device they choose to bring to access information. And the IT infrastructure behind it supports those access protocols. So part and parcel to this journey is the idea that first you virtualize, you standardize within your data center. And I've mentioned those components, the components that are included there, virtualization, solid state, standardization. Those are replicated in the public cloud space so you can move workloads back and forth seamlessly. And that public cloud space is a lot more likely to drive the pejorative term would be commoditization, but it's much more likely that those IT as a service providers are going to be extremely dispassionate about the kind of hardware they buy. It's not pejorative to users. No, it isn't. Commoditize me. Yes, exactly. Drive out cost in other words. And you know, companies can make money, that's cool. Yeah. We as customers don't have a problem with that. That's right. But the reality is if you don't fanatically drive cost out, not going to win in this business. Dave Nicholson, very interesting discussion. Appreciate you coming inside theCUBE, talking about the work that you're doing with Intel, Oracle, very interesting times we're living in, you know, that Chinese proverb. I guess we hit the lottery as far as that goes. Yeah, no kidding. Yeah, thanks very much and good to see you again. It's great to see you too.