 Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante of wikibond.org and this is SiliconANGLE TV's coverage of the NetApp Oracle Open World Customer Event. We were here a month ago for the VMworld NetApp Customer Event and now we're here with Rich Clifton who's the Senior Vice President of the Solutions and Integration Group at NetApp. Rich good to see you again. Great to see you too. So we're here at AT&T Park covering, we love to cover, we call them tech athletes and you're a tech athlete. You've been in this business for a while, you understand the technology and you understand the business. So tell us, what's new in your world? Well we're having a great time as you can see here at this big event. We're out talking about agile data infrastructures, how customers can really create cloud environments and go from building siloed kinds of deployments into agile cloud infrastructures and in addition to that we have people standing up extreme scale big data environments. So we're having a blast with really taking things to the next level across all of that. So talk about agile data infrastructure, what do you mean by that? I mean people, they know agile, they know scrum programming and DevOps, what do you mean by agile? Well from our perspective an agile data infrastructure is one where you can take the infrastructure and scale it, expect it to be up indefinitely and consume it with new things that you're standing up in IT. It's not about procuring infrastructure for each IT project, it's about having an infrastructure you can consume that you can move to an undemanded kind of a consumption model. So what makes NetApp unique? Because a lot of companies will say that or say similar words, what makes NetApp unique in that regard? Well we have the number one storage operating system in the industry and data on tap and it's newer versions allow for the creation of an infrastructure which spans multiple platforms multiple boxes and allows it to live on through things like new upgrades, new hardware infusion and just be able to be an infrastructure and that's completely different from the way people have done storage infrastructures or overall IT infrastructures in the past. It flows together with things like virtualization, it flows together with things like Oracle Rack here at the show with Oracle. It's all a question of really creating a survivable next generation approach to how you do that infrastructure under major IT. So you're talking about the number one storage operating system obviously talking about ONTAP. So I'm reminded of the comment that one CEO made at one point about all the wood behind one arrow and you guys have had all the wood behind one arrow. Now you've made a pretty major acquisition of Ingenio. How does that affect that what I'm calling the all the wood behind one arrow strategy? Is that a fork of that strategy? Is it just that NetApp's growing so large now it needs to acquire some new assets to continue to grow? Add a little color to that if you would. So what we see happening in customers is people creating clouds, mixed shared infrastructures of different kinds of workloads, databases, putting together virtualized applications, creating private clouds, also sitting in service providers as public clouds. But beside that, there are some environments, large scale content repositories, large scale data warehouses where people want to create dedicated infrastructures and the data management is in the application layer. For those environments, our E-Series platform with its price performance and density characteristics is the perfect match. So data ONTAP about shared infrastructures and cloud, E-Series about the very best dedicated infrastructure. So in thinking about NetApp's cloud strategy, I mean essentially you're providing infrastructure to cloud service providers and companies doing private cloud and you've had some success in particular with some of your partners. I think of VMware as an example where a cloud service provider might be using VMware, your customers might be using VMware to create more of a hybrid cloud. I mean that seems to be a direction that the industry is going. My first question is is that sort of something that you see starting to take shape? We definitely see hybrid cloud as a major factor out in the marketplace. We have a set of leading edge customers who are doing that. It's very much about VMware. It's also about Microsoft where we're their cloud partner of the year. But it's also about Oracle and some of the infrastructures here where you can work with Rock, you can work with OVM. So it's a trend that has to do with infrastructure at the next level, absolutely. So talk about Oracle's strategy. I mean Oracle announced this week it's sort of laid out its cloud strategy. I joke that they make it sound like they invented cloud or it was a few short years ago they were denigrating it, but nonetheless the strategies is pretty clear is to essentially build private and public clouds with an all red stack. Now that is something that you would not like to see. You want some NetApp in that stack. So how do you navigate through that marketing slash technology initiative that Oracle is laying down? Well we think that cloud is a broad industry trend and it's no surprise that Oracle is also focusing on this just as every major supplier is. The issue for a customer is how do you mix together technologies and blend them from multiple different places? Microsoft technologies in your mix, when you have VMware technologies in your mix, how do you have an infrastructure that serves all of those? And sure Oracle is looking at some very red kinds of stacks, great. And we see customers who want to blend different technologies together and Oracle needs to have partners who can do that blending in addition to some of their narrow initiatives around the red stack. So it's all good and the partnership gives people open options. So you see that posture of all red, all Oracle, all the time is an opportunity for you? It is, actually it's our opportunity to go in and show the specific value pieces and to show where the red stack can fit, but also how the red stack can live beside some of the other stacks. So talk a little bit about, let's change subjects, talk about flash a little bit and what you guys are doing, specifically from a solutions and integration standpoint. You've announced a new flash strategy, not so much a strategy, I guess a strategy and new sets of products, new sets of partners. Talk about from a solutions and integration standpoint where you're taking that. Great, so we have as a flash offering, we have flash in our storage processors that you can expand it well. We have flash you can put into our shelves and expand it well. This is what we call flash pools. And we have a set of partners around flash going into the host. In this context, the key to flash is making sure that you have a deep integration with the end-to-end data management so that I can use flash in my host to accelerate my database applications or my virtualization applications. But at the same time, I can do snapshots, I can do snap restores, I can do cloning, and have all of that recognized end-to-end in the stack and never be working with a stale cache. So that integration is a key part of getting the high value on data management at the same time as getting the high value of the price performance. Excellent. Rich Clifton, thank you very much for spending some time with us here at AT&T Park. Good luck with your initiatives and good to see you again. Great to see you again too. Thanks. All right, we'll keep it right there. We've got more interviews from AT&T Park. We've got my co-host John Furrier coming up and more tech athletes. We'll be right back.