 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE covering EMCworld 2015, brought to you by EMC, Brocade, and VCE. We're back, this is Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman, we're here at EMCworld, Prasad Rampali is here, he's the CEO of QLogic, good friend, Cube alum Prasad, it's really a pleasure seeing you again. Same here Dave, it's been a pleasure, it's been a while since we chatted, so I'm really, really glad to be here. Yeah, well last time you were with EMC, in quite a different role, now CEO of a smaller but pretty sizable public company. So give us the update, how's it going at QLogic, you enjoying yourself and what's new? Well you didn't ask me why I joined in the first place, so maybe you should start there, right? Why don't you start there? Well, I was really not looking for the role, but as and when it happened, I dug into it, obviously I knew QLogic back even in my Intel days. Sure. It's been a pioneer in IO technologies and Intellect, I acquired their Infiniband business many years ago. So I have a previous understanding of QLogic and after joining EMC, this was back in 2010. QLogic obviously is a very strategic partner at EMC and I came to know them quite intimately. And so when the opportunity came about, the fact that QLogic was, or is, an IO leader in the connectivity space, both on Piper Channel and Ethernet, you might be aware that they have 79 quarters of profitability, which is a pretty long marathon tenure of just bringing in the cash. Couple of that, I've never done a CEO gig before, this was my opportunity, and when I combined the two things, it was a very compelling thing to just pass. Well, it's an interesting market dynamic. For decades you've had this sort of, decade plus you've had this sort of duopoly, and Piper Channel is very, very hard. People that I don't think really understand the difficulty of hard and Piper Channel is like, Stu, I know you know. Yeah, well, Dave, people think, oh, it's a piece of hardware card, right? It's like, come on people, like we've been talking about this software-defined world and everything. I mean, the adapter card business has always been about software and the interoperability there. I mean, that's, you know, most of your engineers are software. Yeah, I'm so glad you said that, Stu, because there is a myth that we are a pure hardware company, but the reality is the core folks who actually do the ASIC IP blocks and the architecture are one-third the engineering side. The two-thirds of the engineering team are software and firmware development. And a lot of that is in the context of operating systems, applications, and ensuring that as you plug in this adapter, this stuff, the storage area network just works, right? And that just works part is got a lot of savvy on firmware software integration with OS driver stacks that just move on, gen to gen to gen to gen. We are on the fifth generation moving to the sixth generation now, Enterprise has an assumption that when you plug in this generation and go to the next generation on a grant-free server, I don't have to re-qualify from ground up. I just do some basic tests and it works. Well, you're moving a lot of data around. Yeah. If you lose any of that data, the world's in big trouble. But so it's been interesting to see the last five years or so. You've got, you know, everybody says Moore's law is dead, but they keep figuring out ways to double every 18 months or less. You've got, you know, virtualization. You've got flash now coming out with this incredible IO performance. How does that, you know, stress the system and how does Q-Logic respond to that? Oh, that's a straight man. That's a great question because I mean, this whole event is all about disruption in the data center and the emergence of the third platform. But the underlying physics are the problem in terms of the creation or the building of the next generation data center architecture is precisely around the displacements that are occurring that you mentioned, right? The key disruptors are, number one, flash from a storage standpoint. Number two, from a transport standpoint, it's the move to 2550, 100 gigabit Ethernet. Number three, fiber channel is actually having a renaissance with flash because, to your point, at the end of the day, people care about mission critical reliability, unquestioned latency and performance and when you get down to it, when you actually look at running SAP Oracle and so on and so forth, people are not jumping to, oh, yeah, I got that 40 gigabit Ethernet or the 100 gigabit Ethernet. I'm going to go use that. It's a good old fiber channel, right? So you have this significant disruption that's occurring and the question is, as a data center guy, how are you going to bring all this goodness together into the next generation architecture? And therein lies the opportunity for us because we think that I.O. is a very critical pillar for this emerging architecture and these adapter cards that you mentioned have an opportunity to go through a metamorphosis enabling the next level of I.O. intelligence besides just I.O. transport and that's what we're doing. Prasad, anybody that knows Q-Logic knows about the I.O. piece, knows the important place that Q-Logic has played in the ecosystem. What's your vision for Q-Logic that they're going for? There's been so many changes in the last couple of years. I think it was in the keynote this morning they said that the pace of change is only going to increase. So we know that's the stage. So in that ever-changing world, what's Q-Logic's place? Where do you want to see the company going? In a nutshell, we want to be the pre-eminent I.O. solutions provider for enterprise and cloud. That sounds simple in statement, but obviously it's pretty ambitious. And we want to do it in two phases over the next three, four years. Phase one is we want to absolutely be number one on rock solid foundation for I.O. connectivity which is all the transports that happen for data from servers through switches to target storage environments. We want it to be on our capability, on our systems. So when I look at the enterprise, it's been the OEMs that have been a huge partner of yours, companies like EMC, like HP, and others. When you talk about the cloud, can you talk about how Q-Logic plays there? Is it through some of those partnerships? Is it on your own working with some of the biggest guys in the world? How does Q-Logic's cloud vision go? Yeah, so we have a two-pronged approach. All clouds are not the same as you know. So when you look at the managed service provider clouds which are large multi-tenant infrastructure and capabilities, the go-to market is still through our tier one OEMs, HP, Dell, IBM, and the like. And we are working very closely with them on enabling workloads much like what you've heard in this conference around scale out and enabling that with the right level of performance and latency with our core technology. So we are delivering next-generation servers and storage systems on Ethernet that uniquely enable scale-out architectures. In the public cloud space, we are working directly with a target set of end customers, in this case service providers who are establishing, hey, this is what the white workloads are. And here's what I'd like to see, uniquely drives IO capabilities that meet and maximize my workload. So we are applying both core focus areas, one with the tier one OEMs in the MSP cloud and then direct end customers in the web-scale space. So I wonder if you can give us your CEO perspective on just objective. So if you think of it, we were at Service Now Knowledge a couple of weeks ago, Frank Slutman's company. You don't know if you've passed cross with Frank when he was here, they're all about TAM expansion. The TAM is 20 billion, then it's 30 billion, then it's 40 billion, and people get all excited. A lot of CEOs worry about TAM expansion. It seems like your objectives would be somewhat different, execution, profitability, maintaining and growing market share. I wonder if you could put that into context for us. So how do you think about the market? Are you eager to find new markets and grow into new spaces? Or are you really trying to focus and executing on your main market? Great question, and the answer is we want to do both. First is our core business has got about a $1.6 billion TAM. When you look at fiber channel and ethernet connectivity, and we want to be number one or number two. We are number one in the fiber channel space and we are already a number two, strong number two, with Intel as number one in the ethernet space. So that's just core connectivity and we are building a whole level of adjacency next to it by going up the IO stack and back to Stu's point, software is the key for us. And so we are leveraging higher order software IO capabilities that add new value and expand our TAM. So today our share of available market is roughly 1.2 to 1.6 and our goal is to get to a $7 billion addressable TAM. And I don't want to steal the thunder of what's coming in the analyst day. By the way, we're doing an analyst day on the 15th of May in that NASDAQ and I'm going to talk about our phase two agenda of revenue expansion with an addressable TAM of $7 billion. And how we go about doing it? Well, the streets been excited about QLogic this year. I mean, the story is resonating and you haven't even told the full story yet. Yeah, QLogic 2.0. That's the buzzword or that's the tagline. And in a nutshell, it's all about transforming from a rock solid IO connectivity player to an intelligent IO solutions player with software as the blue crystals, if you will. All right, so Prasad, you lay out that Q2.0. For the industry watchers, people that are keeping an eye on QLogic, what should we be looking for later this year? What can we say? Hey, are they executing as they said? They're delivering what we expect to see. What should we look for the rest of 2015? Besides holding our own on market segment share back to Dave's point on our core capabilities, we want to be the first to announce 2550, 100 gigabit ethernet controllers with full low latency fabric protocol capabilities, specifically RDMA support on things like ROC and IWARP, which are a big deal for scale out workloads. So watch for that. Number two, you're going to see us partnering with some very key players who are a big presence in cloud markets, where we will be their preferred partner and go to market for these cloud environments. And we're going to have intelligent software that will enable things like dedu, encryption, mirroring, and so on, that is enabled natively in the data pack by our connectivity cards with software and providing these higher value add services for overall system performance. And so that's a big deal for us, and just watch this space. All right, Prasad, we have to leave it there. Prasad Rampali, CEO at Q-Logic, guiding the company into new waters, tripling, more than tripling, the opportunity from a TAM standpoint, steady hand at the wheel in the core markets. Thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. It's great to see you again. Yeah, thanks for having me, guys. All right, pleasure. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. 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