 Okay, we're back live at Oracle OpenWorld. This is SiliconANGLE.TV's coverage where all the action is happening in tech in San Francisco, California for Oracle OpenWorld. Day three of our extended coverage, exclusive coverage, blanket coverage of Oracle OpenWorld. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the ceiling from the noise. I'm joined with my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante, wikibon.org, and our next guest is Jason Cotsoftis. Sorry, Cotsoftis. Who's with EMC. He is the director of strategic alliances. Jason's been on theCUBE a number of times. Jason, welcome back. Thank you. Good to be back. Yeah, good to see you. Another Oracle OpenWorld. Another one. My 15th in a row, I think. Really? Yes. Well, wow. You've seen the changes over the years. Let's start there. Talk about how this has evolved, and in particular, Oracle OpenWorld. We're going to talk about how this has evolved. In particular, Oracle's position in the marketplace. It's been amazing. In 96, when I first came to Oracle World, they were a software database company, hadn't even really gotten into apps, and EMC was a storage company. Now, if you look at today, the keynotes from Oracle this week, they've gone from software and apps into infrastructure. We've gone from hardware and storage up into software. It's an interesting example of how the industry is converging, and we're all building out complete infrastructure stacks today. Yeah. I mean, what's the relationship with Oracle? You wouldn't have been at a Sun conference 10 years ago. Right. But in essence, part of this is Sun, but what's the relationship with Oracle these days? It's great. There's obviously a co-operative with every most IT vendors today, and EMC and Oracle are no exception. What brings us back to Oracle World is really the fact that we have 70,000 customers together, and most of them are going to be here at the show, and they want to hear from EMC and Oracle as they run Oracle applications, middleware and database software on EMC infrastructure. How are we going to help them? How are we going to help them with the challenges they have and integration and support? So the relationship today is a balance of, in some areas, we do compete, but in other areas, we actually still do very good engineering together, and today, actually, we announced a good example of that around data integrity. We'll talk about that. What did you announce? Yeah, so today, one of the challenges on a lot of Oracle customer environments is data corruption, silent data corruption. So after a piece of data leaves the Oracle database, makes its way through the stack towards storage, it can get corrupted as it passes through HBAs, the network, and other components. And when it gets to the storage system, it would be really nice if we could check it and make sure that it's the same data that we got from Oracle when it left the database. And so we've actually engineered with Oracle and Emulex from the HBA to check the Oracle data as it moves through the stack, make sure it hasn't been corrupted. Yeah, I hear a little bit about silent data corruption, but it's like this insidious evil that a lot of customers just don't even realize what's going on out there, right? Yeah, it's true, and it's really a factor of scale. The larger your Oracle environments are, it's going to happen as a matter of probability. And so it's... And if it impacts your... If it gets into storage and it's moved around the data center, it can cause a lot of impact. I think that's an important point. Essentially, what you're saying is that the... Because of the data growth, the amount of data that we're managing, the probability of having some type of silent data corruption is approaching near certainty. Yeah, and we've always done a great job within our platforms to protect against that. The key now is that we can detect it much sooner even before it gets to the storage array because of our integration with Oracle. And so that means what? Better performance, less overhead. Yeah, it means detecting the corruption sooner so you can resolve it sooner. Yeah, okay. Sleep better. Sleep better. Keep it up and available. So, interesting to see the themes and the messages at this event. I mean, we're hearing a lot about cloud. We start there. You guys, you know, clopped on that cloud bandwagon pretty early. We did. And the big data bandwagon. We'll talk about that. But what do you make of Oracle's entrance into the cloud? Well, I think it was inevitable. It was interesting a couple years ago. Larry said the cloud's nothing more than the internet. And he kind of resisted that message for a while. But I think, you know, everybody has to have a cloud story today. And when I listen to Oracle's story, it's as much as they say it's about application choice and choice of deployment. Behind that, he said yesterday in his keynote, it's very much about having the right stack. And that stack in their view is Oracle. So it's an interesting approach. Yeah, it's clear. You know, it's funny. We had Jason, we had Scott McNeely on at the Cube at EMC World this year. Remember, John? And he said, he looked at the camera. He said, I should have just called it cloud. The network is the computer. And so here we are. But I think you're right. It was interesting because Jeremy, first of all, Joe Tucci was very respectful. Yes, he was. As you'd expect. I've called him the godfather of the IT industry. And he was kind of a vuncular up there. But Jeremy did take a little tongue and cheek at Oracle saying choice and flexibility. Choice and flexibility, not something you've heard much about this week. Larry's response was, we give you choice because we write everything in Java, if you've heard his keynote. So it's always interesting to see Oracle in particular, Larry, take what's perceived as their weakness and turn it into a strength. Everything's written in Java. If you use Oracle Fusion apps. Yes. I think their choice is very much an apps message, but the infrastructure is very much an Oracle message. Well, that's right. Think about what we followed the VCE and Vblock trend. And we've often said, well, VCE was first, but really exadata was sort of the first sort of converged infrastructure, if you will, by definition. And it's really not general purpose. It's not, you know, and even though Vblock is any color you want, as long as it's black, it's part of a VMware ecosystem, which is I think generally considered fairly open. And so I guess the question is, how do you compare and contrast what you guys are doing with something like Vblock versus an exadata? That's a great question. I think it's pretty simple. Everybody wants to move to standardization in the cloud. I think that's something everybody agrees on, whether it's Oracle or EMC or whoever. The question will be where you want to standardize. And our view at EMC is most customers, and there have been surveys about this with IOUG and others, over 90% of customers run multiple databases, multiple applications, multiple operating systems. So where we've kind of drawn the line in the standardization is at the hypervisor level, but openness for database and applications that you want to run. I think Oracle's taking it a little bit further up the stack and said standardization up to including the Oracle database in middleware layer. And so obviously that's in their interest because they sell those technologies. From an EMC perspective, we have a separation where we're more open around different database types, different middleware, different applications, et cetera. DB2, SQL server. Right, and then of course there's Vspecs who's actually a response to that standardization at the VMware level. You've got alternatives there, some trade-offs, maybe not the single block. Yeah, Vspecs gives you that standardization, but then gives you a little bit more choice on, you can choose the network, you can choose the server, you can even choose the hypervisor. So Vblock's all about VMware, and if you go to Vspecs, you can actually look at Hyper-V, for example, from Microsoft, which is very common in the mid-market for us. And you can also look at different networks. You can use Brocade or Cisco. Yeah, that whole converged infrastructure space was pretty interesting. We looked at that in some detail and sized the market roughly. It's just an enormous tam. Essentially it's everything. We figured it's about a $400 billion tam. Give us an update on what's going on there. What are the partners saying in terms of that whole converged space? So converged infrastructure is a big trend. We work with, as you know, all the leading network companies, virtualization. And we see a lot of customers wanting to converge down their network protocols, their storage infrastructure, their applications, their databases. For us, that leads to really the need for tiering storage. And that was a big thing you heard yesterday in the keynote is, if you're going to put more applications and more databases on less and more converged infrastructure, it's going to put pressure on the storage. And the storage needs to be able to react and tune itself automatically. You don't want to have to have database administrators and apps administrators waiting for the storage admin to retune and reconfigure the storage. So we put a lot of effort into automating that. And then, as Jeremy talked about, inserting flash technology at the right layers to really boost that performance. That's really where our play is in convergence right now. Excellent. So, you said there's a 15th year in a row at Oracle OpenWorld. Well, here's wishing you 15 more, I think. Yeah, thanks. But where do you see this going? I mean, look out, put on your, bring on the binoculars, five years out. What do you think the industry's going to look like in five years? And generally, and then specifically, what do you think EMC and Oracle will be? I think so, on the first question, I think one theme that you're going to continue to see is consolidation. Even the last several years, we've seen a lot of acquisitions, a lot of consolidation, and down to a handful of really big, complete IT players. I think that's going to continue. I think a lot of those acquisitions in the future are going to be around big data. Over the last couple years, they've been around virtualization and cloud and things like that. So I think that trend's going to continue. I think EMC and Oracle, it's going to be a lot of the same in that we're going to have strong overlap in customers. We're running Oracle software and EMC infrastructure, and we're going to have to work together to help those customers. And we're going to see, you know, continued overlap in products that's as well, not just with EMC and Oracle, but with Oracle and all of their other partners. I think that's going to continue as well. Jason, I want to ask you a bit more of a big picture. It's our third year here, our third year doing live theCUBE here, and the mood has changed from three years ago. I mean, our first time here, we were kind of in a gorilla way, just knocking in theCUBE logic here, and now we're formalizing it. The mood was like Oracle's making moves, and Oracle's so big, when they move the battleship, or the aircraft carriers, it moves them a lot. A lot of drag to it. And money is effective. People's businesses are effective. Last year it was like, okay, cloud, kind of hype, okay, Larry's kind of putting lipstick on a pig, that's what we were talking about. This year he followed through, it's a little bit different in the sense that there's already around it. Do you agree with that? That statement that there's been this Oracle quickly retooling, and do you agree with that? And what do you think their next steps are relative to the messaging? Honestly, they want to agree. Yeah, I completely agree. At Analogy Eldra's EMC, in the early 2000s, when I was at EMC, we acquired Data General, and we evolved the Clarion product line, and now that's the VNX, it takes a couple of years to ingest it, adapt it into your company. And Oracle went through a similar process with Sun. And I think it took them a couple of years to get the Sun hardware business as part of their core message. Going from a software company into a hardware company is a big, big move. And I think last year it was all about Exadata, stack, hardware, hardware, even Larry's keynote on Sunday last year was all about hardware. I think this year they've now taken it to cloud and they've started to take it to big data. And I think next year they're probably going to continue along those lines and maybe even do a little bit more about big data. One of the things that Larry said in his keynote is big data meet big iron. Do you think that big data and big iron are hand and glove, or is big iron antithetical to big data? I think it depends on the definition of big iron. For us, it's less about, as Jeremy said yesterday in his keynote, big data is about the results. And customers want the infrastructure that's going to give them the result and the performance that they need. Now, we have different ways of doing that. We obviously have the platform to scale out and meet that demand with Isilon. We feel that you need a parallel scale out architecture for that. And then you need the right platform to crunch the analytics and get the result, which is Green Plum for us. Oracle's positioning that is one stack today with Exadata and Exolitics. I think big iron, I don't know if it's big as much as it needs to be fast and it needs to scale. Now, what size that comes in or how it scales, we have different views on that, obviously. All right, Jason, well listen, thanks very much for coming on the QBEMC. I love the cloud meets big data and then here we are two or three years later and Oracle's floating right in, riding that wave. Cloud meets big iron, Larry's big slogan last night. Copying your moves. It was great about EMC day. It was a totally trumped Larry's big data demo. Jeremy, good job. So EMC, got to love you guys for how you've grown your company. It's fantastic. Okay, this is the Cube. We'll be right back with our next guest. This is our flagship program for the events. If you'd like to see them from the noise, we'll be right back. Thanks, guys.