 open world with you guys. So we're here with Satish Lakshmanan, who's at QLogic, a very knowledgeable Satish. Great to have you back on the queue. Thanks Dave, great to be here. Very knowledgeable individual about a lot of things. We're going to talk about convergence. You're in the host solutions group, which is a real core of QLogic's business. A lot of people might not know. QLogic essentially builds the glue between the servers and the storage and the network and makes all that data flow and makes it such that we don't lose the data, which is very important, and it gets there fast. So QLogic makes IP that essentially sits in between those key components and has a lot of secret sauce to make sure that data's reliable and secure and as I say, fast. But so we're going to talk about convergence, a favorite topic of ours. What do we mean by convergence? Bringing together storage and networking and servers. How that fits into virtualization and cloud. Well I mean QLogic last year Dave, I mean at least from my perspective, really you guys moved the needle on your brand. I mean I think QLogic last year really emerged out of the card business and established your brand as a data center brand with the switches and the technology. So congratulations. You guys are always in a horse race with the OEM deals. You guys had great success last year and I thought it was a great year. You guys did great and so how do you top that? What's next? So tell us. If you think about QLogic's pedigree in history, we've been more of a fiber channel storage infrastructure company. And with convergence happening, our opportunity to grow, whether it's 10 gigabit ethernet, whether it's InfiniBand, whether it's FCOE, which essentially is block based storage over 10 gigabit ethernet, these are all net new growth areas for QLogic. So I think the opportunity's out there. If you follow some of the industry analyst reports, if you look at the growth opportunity for just pure 10 gig, out in 2014, if you look at Delaro, for example, or Creehen Research, we have the opportunity to pretty much double our TAM, this total available market out there through the products that QLogic brings to the enterprise customer base. So I think the opportunity is there for us. The challenge will be to produce the right products that end users want, the right products that OEMs are willing to qualify and embed in their portfolio. And it's for us to capitalize on that growth market. So we talk about convergence. We talk about the bringing together of servers and storage and networking into a single technology. So are people doing that? Why are they doing that? What are the reasons for doing that? Sure. A great question. I think, yeah, convergence is definitely happening. If you turn the clock back to three, four years ago when Cisco and QLogic and EMC and all the other partners in the ecosystem introduced FCOE, people were skeptical about it. People understood, at least on paper, the value proposition of FCOE and the benefits that it brought from a total cost of ownership perspective, reducing the cabling and complexity at the edge. And people now are starting to embrace that technology and actually deploy it, not just in their development environment but in actual production data centers. In fact, a few months ago, they will be published a case study along with a healthcare customer for the healthcare vertical, Payformance. They're key to billing type of applications when it comes to healthcare facilities. So Payformance actually adopted QLogic's CNA technology, tried to basically test and evaluate the value proposition of FCOE initially in their development environment and I've gone around and deployed it and actually running traffic today over FCOE. So it's happening, albeit maybe a little slower than expected, but I think the position of QLogic right now is a very good one and I've used this metaphor earlier. We kind of like the arms dealer. We want people to embrace convergence if that's the problem that they wanted to resolve in the data center but at the end of the day, if FCOE works for them and continues to work for them, they should go ahead and deploy a fiber channel, native fiber channel. What about the cloud? Well, let's talk about the cloud or at EMC, cloud meets big data. What's your cloud strategy? What's the unique value proposition that you bring to cloud computing? So great question, Dave. So if you think about QLogic as a technology provider, so are we provide our controller chips to EMC as a matter of fact that power their platforms and allow native fiber channel or FCOE connectivity to the fabric and to the backend? So we are part and parcel of EMC's big data and cloud strategy. But if I were to use a metaphor for cloud and I parse it down to the three layers, which is infrastructure as a service, platform as a service or application as a service and I think about the adaptive convergence, technology and capabilities we introduced into your product in October last year. So what we allow, so if you look at an infrastructure as a service customer for example, today in the cloud model and if they want to be able to support multiple protocols simultaneously in the same hardware, they can do so through QLogic. So different customers, whether they want native fiber channel connectivity for backend, if they want pure ethernet connectivity for the front and mid tier of the data center, if they want infinite band for high performance computing, they can get all of that through QLogic technology. So we provide enabling technologies to infrastructure as a service customers. Let's talk about platform as a service. So we support multiple VMware, Microsoft operating systems, we're tested and validated across all those operating systems. So we're in a great position to be able to provide platform as a service vendors, that abstraction layer so to speak from underlying infrastructure and we're tested and validated and today we ship more than 10 million fiber channel ports. So really proven implementations across multiple technologies. Let's talk application as a service. So for applications as a service providers, virtualization puts a lot more burden on them when it comes to pure IO performance. They don't want IO to become a bottleneck when it comes to serving applications and as you virtualize and put more applications in the same physical server or physical storage, you basically want to make sure IO doesn't become the bottleneck. So our technology which allows for IO virtualization whether it's Nick partitioning or whether it's industry standard virtualization like SRIOV, through the deployment of that, through the deployment of full offload. And IO is hot too because I mean look at flash, right? I mean I think the flash movement points to what your value proposition has been for years got to make that IO work. And I think that data center focus is really key and what I'm wondering is how does that extend out into the chip side? Because you guys have that chip vision, the ASIC vision, how does that all come together? Can you give us an update on that? Because that integration point is the number one thing people want to know about. So what our vision right now is to support multiple protocols, simultaneously a one piece of hardware. There are certainly development efficiencies involved in making that decision from Qlogic's perspective, right? We don't want to have different product lines, different architectures supporting fundamentally the IO's. So we believe in having a single chip that supports multiple protocols whether it's native fiber channel, FCOE, iSCSI block based storage or file based storage over TCPIP. We want to be able to power that through one chip. So it's convergence, true convergence from a hardware and software perspective and Qlogic completely embraces it. You talked about 10 million fiber channel ports out there. I thought fiber channel was dead, Satish. Is fiber channel alive and well? Oh, it's a great question. I don't think fiber channel is dead at all. Recently you saw a spate of announcements about 16 gig fiber channel. Qlogic has continued to invest in 16 gig fiber channel. We have several OEM design wins and products under development right now that I unfortunately can't publicly talk about. So it's definitely not dead. We're investing in 32 gig fiber channel. So I think it's going to be healthy and it will continue for a long time. Yeah, I hosted, as you know, a panel out at SNW and the fiber channel industry association was very active in that panel. It's got a strong roadmap. I joke because a lot of people say, oh, fiber channel is dead. But if you want to save mission critical data or store mission critical data, you're absolutely more likely going to store it on the fiber channel. We've been having a lot of conversations. Dave and I have been having a lot of conversations about specifically IO in context to the IPO of Fusion IO and everyone's talking about SSD flash as the innovation in storage. Multi-cores. And it brings up a lot of philosophical conversations around the future of the data center. And my vision is a little bit different than some of the old school analysts that are out there. No offense, I'm not Dave's one of them, but a lot of Dave's friends. Like who? Like Steve Duclessy, our old school. And my philosophy is that people are looking at Facebook as a one-off. I don't see Facebook as a one-off. I think Facebook will look like a lot of the data centers of the future. A lot of open source, a lot of big data, a lot of IO, a lot of applications. So that's your wheelhouse. You guys are playing and I know you can't talk about it, but from what I've heard, a lot of the big data centers like Facebook and Google. What's your, how do you talk about that new environment? How does Q-Logic see that? So I think you're exactly right. It's different from the traditional view of the data center. Our participation in it, we're an infrastructure company as you mentioned when we first talked about Q-Logic. So our desire is to sell infrastructure to whoever, however they deploy it, right? So that's why I talked about our participation in the cloud. It's whether it's private cloud, public cloud, hybrid model at the end of the day as long as they use Q-Logic technology. Whatever protocols that they want to support, we are willing to support anything, common piece of hardware. So for us, it's providing all those- You're not getting in the way. We're not getting in the way. We want to enable, provide all those enabling technologies that lets them deploy and use applications, how they see fit in a virtualized or a non-virtualized environment. So how about innovation? You know, where is Q-Logic's roadmap taking it from an innovation standpoint? Where are you putting your efforts and you've done a good job of differentiating? You know, you made a really big push to own your IP, to invest in Silicon. You've made some acquisitions to get into the Lanham motherboard business. What's next in terms of innovation? So in terms of innovation, for us, we believe in having a single architecture for all our products. So you talked about the NetZen acquisition that brought in, in a 10-gubed Ethernet IP, what we have done is we basically integrated all of that on a single platform, single piece of hardware. We can support multiple protocols whether it's a native fiber channel, 10-gubed Ethernet, which is TCP, IP, FCO, and iSCSI. So that's the first piece of it. From an innovation perspective, which is the question you asked, I think there are basically four pillars where we are investing. We want to make sure that you can support multiple protocols in one piece of hardware. We want to make sure that we have full offload capability, so it's not you chewing up CPU resources, but basically we're offloading all of that IO protocol to the hardware, so CPU and memory resources available for applications. We want to make sure that we provide the right security for cloud environment. There's so much discussion these days at EMC World about cloud, but security is definitely a big concern for the end customer. So we believe in providing IP sec-based security for TCP, IP, or iSCSI traffic. Future products will support FCSP, both encryption and authentication. So we want to make sure we embrace security technologies and of course virtualization. IO virtualization is something that we're focusing on and we want to make sure that we are able to provide either single root IO virtualization or N-PAR, which is Q-Logic developed technology that provides a lot of differentiation to OEMs because it doesn't depend on a switch for VM to VM communication. And also, we support OEM proprietary IO virtualization technologies like Flex10. Yeah, so you've always had a culture of R&D innovation. You guys have been very proud of that. Your former CEO is really well known as a visionary, right? HK is really widely respected. John mentioned up front that you guys had a good year in terms of just transitioning the brand. You know, you basically announced the deal where you were second sourcing switches to HP, kind of popping Cisco out. Of course, HP and Cisco are involved in a urinary Olympics and everybody knows that well, but so that was for two years for you. You're not viewed as a competitor to HP as Cisco is. How's that FC switch business going and what's the future hold there? Oh, a great question. I think it's done very well. So if you follow some of Delaro's market share reports, you know, the last two, three years Australia gained market share, where it's 16% of market for fixed switch ports. So overall, our switch business, I think, is doing really well. Our EMC Select actually carries our switch portfolio as well so they can fulfill that to the end user. So there's a lot of opportunity for us through the different channels that we have, the OEM channel, where OEMs like HP have embraced our ad switch technology. We'll continue to fulfill that. EMC Select will continue to fulfill it. And Q-Logic brand through Q-Logic's go-to-market. So I think there's tremendous opportunity for not just fiber channel switching, but also for infinite band products, post and switch products. Excellent. So Q-Logic transitioning the brand, leading in CNAs, you know, leading in FCOE, innovating, talking about, you know, the pillars of innovation. Satish, great as always to have you on theCUBE. Thanks very much for coming on. It's great to meet you guys and thanks for the time. Great to see you again.