 Live from San Francisco. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's the Cube. Covering Oracle Open World 2015 from Studio C. Brought to you by Cisco. Now your host, Stu Miniman and Jeff Brick. And we're excited to be here for our second year in Studio C with the team from Cisco. We're joined in this segment by, I guess, Stu Miniman from Wikibon and Jim McHugh. VP of Cisco UPS, EVP, CBP. Whatever, VP. Whatever. Welcome, Jim. Thank you. Thank you for having me. So it's been a year since we were last here visiting with you. What's been going on? How have you guys moved the ball down the field in the last 12 months? I mean growth. That's the answer. I mean, if you looked back last year, I was probably telling you like, we're closing in on being number one and not out just in the U.S. but in America. Now I'm telling you we're closing on being number one in X86 Blades worldwide. We're clearly, clearly the leader in the Americas. Hands down. And now we're looking forward to actually extending that to the rest of the world. Why? Why is the adoption so great? What are you hearing from customers in the marketplace that people are embracing what you've got? Well, if you follow the history of UCS. When we started off with consolidation, then we went to desktop virtualization. But now if you look at any workload that's possibly out there, it's running on UCS now. And UCS and our integrated infrastructure partner. So that could be, you know, eBlock, a FlexPod, a VersaStack, or, you know, SmartStack. All these things are just taking off and really going well for us. Yeah, Jim, I'm playing right out. I wrote an article talking about, you know, the day of selling solutions, you know, just individual products in the silos. You know, we've been talking about that blowing up for years. But with acquisitions like Dell and EMC, it really is talking about systems. Listen to what's happening in the Oracle keynote. That's about systems, about platforms, about integrations. I think many people didn't understand when Cisco launched UCS. They're like, oh, Cisco's getting into the server business. And I don't think that's how Cisco looked at it at the beginning. And, you know, you've got so many partnerships that you've helped drive it. Could you maybe give a little bit of color on that? Yeah, so, I mean, Cisco has a server, but we're in the compute business, right? So, because it's a unified computing system as you laid out. And it was designed from the beginning to bring together compute, network, and storage access. And because we had that storage access as part of the right from the beginning, that's why we have so many partners. That's why our storage strategy is so open to meet the customer's needs. So, whether it's, again, EMC, NetApp, IBM, Nimble, go down the line, they plug in really well to our solutions. And more and more, that's what customers are demanding. More flexibility. Workloads are requiring different sort of solutions when we hit it. So, one of the other things we look at is how much is a system just completely optimized for a single workload? So, for example, we're here at Oracle Open World. Oracle's well known for building kind of the red stack, you know, all the way down to the silicon, all the way up to the application versus a generalized platform. How does Cisco and its partners kind of balance that, you know, optimization versus flexibility? The funny thing is, Cisco, the server component of it, is probably the most commodity thing you got going. You know, when we look at it, it's Intel. It's, you know, when we need extra GPUs, we go to NVIDIA, like everybody else does. If we need memory, we go to the standard memory guys. Our secret sauce is in the management of it. So the fact that we have different form factors, so if you're at the edge, you know, UCS Mini, tying in there, or if you're out looking at our M series for scale, web scale, or if you're looking at our C for big data, or for big enterprise apps like we do here, it's mostly our B series. We manage all those identically, where you're actually defining the properties of the server in software. You're creating a service profile and you're saying, now I'd like to apply the service profile across server, racks, rows, data centers, and minutes, and I can make those changes in minutes. So that's what's really the radical thing that's taken off. Cisco not only got out in bringing together a system, we got out in front of everybody as far as management. And that was shocking to some of the traditional server guys that we actually just jumped so far out in advance, but once customers figure out how much time they save, it was a no-brainer. All right, so one of the other big topic points, especially, it's almost a little surprising after all the years of here. I mean, cloud dominating the discussion here. Can you talk a bit about how UCS fits into the overall cloud discussion? Yeah, we're the cloud infrastructure. Still a large percentage of cloud is private cloud. And then we have virtual private clouds that we would partner with at different locations. So that's still our big bread and butter, but in general, UCS is actually a great platform for cloud because again, I can scale it up, I can scale it down. Not all clouds are the same, right? If you're doing Oracle-type clouds, that's very different than an open stack, Hadoop analytics-type cloud. I mean, you're looking for different requirements. But if I have to manage them differently, I'm creating more headaches for myself, right? You know, it's nice to know that an appliance could fit in and solve this one little particular problem. But if I have to manage that appliance completely different than I manage everything else, I'm only incurring cost. Yeah, you bring up a great point. We've often criticized, you know, we talk about hybrid cloud, but really it's more like multi-cloud because do I have on-prem? Yes. Do I have public cloud multiples? Do I have SaaS? Yes. And you know, how do I tie those all together because if I can't solve that operational problem, I've just created more sprawl and more mess. Exactly. So, I mean, Cisco, you know, obviously is much more than a networking company, but you know, how do you help on the operational size? You talked a little bit about the management tools. You know, Cisco doesn't own all of it. So how, you know, what piece do you own? You know, what other things do you tie into? Well, the thing that Cisco does really well is our validated designs. And our validated designs start with, you know, we use UCS Director to spin up the infrastructure itself. Then management of that, you got UCS Manager, UCS Central. But then once you start getting into the automation, we have our tools, but our partners do as well. And that's where we actually have to deliver to what our customers want. And our management opportunity here is that we're all open. Everything's open, northbound APIs. So I don't care if you're using Microsoft, right? Microsoft partners with everybody now, so I think we can talk about them at Oracle shows, right? So, with Sati involved, I think we're loud. Our APIs pass northbound to Microsoft. They pass northbound to VMware. They pass northbound to a VBlock system. They pass northbound to whatever. And it just makes it easy on the customer that they can call upon the key management features we built in. And that's really what's the game changer. It is an open approach that people are starting to catch on. And if they don't catch on, it's fine. UCS will keep gaining market share. It's fine. Yeah, so Jim, you know, it's always great. We get lots of headline clicks when we talk about, you know, the wars. It's the stack wars. It's the cloud wars. You know, you mentioned Microsoft's everywhere. Last time I talked to you was the open stack show. You know, very open. Even, you know, Dell EMC, there's ties with what Cisco's doing there. Obviously, VCE is critically important customer. Billions of dollars. You know, is the industry looking at this wrong? How do you look at the partnerships? You know, what does openness mean to Cisco? I think, you know, you're, I'm going to go back to something Scott McNeely used to say when I was at Sun. You guys know Sun. If you make it as easy to migrate off your platform as it is easy to migrate onto your platform, that level of openness, that level of cooperation, customers trust you. And when customers trust you, they come to you when they have a business problem. And that's what Cisco's in the business of. Solving people's business problems. The infrastructure problems we solved already. Now we want to help them solve their business problems and to do that, you got to be a trusted partner. And to do that, you have to work with a broad, you know, components. We can talk about hybrid clouds. You know, that's what VMware called hybrid applications. That's where it's going. There's so many different types of applications and so many different solutions that span from the edge to the data center, to the cloud, to the hyperscale cloud, that you need different platforms underneath that. It's not all the same. You know, I'm sorry. What you need under Oracle and what you need under Exchange and what you need under Hadoop are three different infrastructure software. And Cisco has to be open and fast to that response. It's just funny too, when you see the logo slides, everybody loves to put their logo slides, as if like Anheuser-Busch is a company, right? Like there's one instance of this stuff at Anheuser-Busch. I mean, so many applications. And he said so many different places that people are applying stuff. Yeah, definitely. So how are you seeing now from the field? You're out in the field a lot. You talked to a lot of customers. Cloud's been around a while. We're kind of a little ways down this journey. How is adoption changing? How are they starting to execute more? What do you kind of see it in the field in terms of adoption? Yeah, I think, well, finally, people in the cloud don't... I mean, in the field a lot of them are beyond... Oh, yeah. I virtualize my data center. It's, you know, cloud ready. Well, you know, you need some automation software in there as well. And people are starting to understand that. So a lot of the things that we do in the cloud space, it's starting to get that level. I think people are really looking to, again, where's the best place to run that application? Is it a cloud? And if they ask me, my answer is, do you know what your utilization rate's going to be? Because then you have to figure out where, what type of cloud. Should you run the cloud or should a partner run a cloud? And once we get that level of utilization up, the options are going to keep growing. Because right now, it's expensive for some partners to run your software for you because the utilization's low. It's expensive for you to run it in your own data center if your utilization's low. That's where a public cloud is just perfect. But once that utilization gets up really high, it's expensive to run it in a public cloud, and it's going to be more affordable for partners to offer you services that are particular to that. So I think it's going to be shifting. If everybody wants the perfect, where are we? And I'd say, well, here's where we are, you know, one week before Halloween in October in 2015, that's the situation. You know, next year, I think we're going to go much more to public. So Jim, one of the reasons we wanted to have you on first is, you know, we've got a lot of your partners, we've got some of your customers. What do you expect to see both, you know, here on our program and Cisco's presence at the show this week? I think what you're going to hear is how, actually how great it is to work with Cisco. You know, dust off my own quilt, but the reality is we are great to partner with. And a lot of people really, truly like to engage with Cisco. We have an amazing channel that we can execute through. So as our partners join us and we actually come up with our preferred partners and certain of the channels, it's just the execution really goes well. So once we say, okay, this is an important solution for our customers, this will help them solve their business problems and we create a CBD around it and start the channel programs around it, it's just a machine. It runs really well, it executes well, and I think a lot of our partners and our customers appreciate that. And we talked about that a little at the open, because you guys are everywhere. You're an open stack, you know, you're at so many of these shows. You're at Red Hat. You guys are really actively partnering in this ecosystem. It isn't like a single stack, not even close. It can't be. And you know, the truth is even workloads we dominate it have changed over the years. You know, I said it was consolidation and desktop virtualization. Desktop virtualization has changed. You know, a couple of years ago it was all pretty straightforward. Then actually you needed a better user experience, so we and other people started including NVIDIA, getting the faster GPU in there and that made a lot of sense. Then it became as a service and now it's back again. So you've got to watch these things where customers are and what their appetite is and that's taking off, you know. And so as the marketing guy, I have to figure, okay, all right, demand's up again. We've got to actually start switching some attention back there. And then big data, a lot of connection that Oracle's doing with their database and the Hadoop, that's going to be big. A lot of data warehouse optimization, that's going to be big. So we just see a lot of taking off. It's good. So it's just amazing how it continues to tie. Where's the compute? Where is the storage? Moving back and forth. These hybrid applications and it's still ultimately about the apps, right? It's still ultimately about the applications. Don't tell the rest of my infrastructure partners, but it's the applications that actually solve the business problems. We solve the problems that the applications have in meeting those needs. Absolutely. Well, great. Well, Jim, we're looking forward to having a great couple of days here at Studio C. So thanks for stopping by. We'll see you a few more times, I think, over the course of the next several days. You will. Absolutely. All right, thanks, guys. All right, so Jim McHugh. I'm Jeff Frick with Stu Miniman. You're watching The Cube. We are live at Oracle Open World 2015. Studio C, stop by like booth 800. Look forward to seeing you. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.