 Live from the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, California, it's the Cube at Oracle Open World 2014 brought to you by headline sponsor Cisco Systems with support from NetApp. And now here are your hosts, Stu Miniman and Jeff Frick. Welcome back everyone. We are at Oracle Open World. You're watching the Cube. I'm Jeff Frick. We're here for our third day of wall-to-wall coverage. We've been here getting all the great guests, extracting the signal from the noise, finding the smartest people we can find, bringing them on the Cube and asking them the questions that you'd like to ask them. I'm excited for this segment, joined by my co-host, Stu Miniman. Hi, Jeff. Thanks. Glad to be here in the Cisco booth. Joining us for this segment is Ben Iref, who's director of product management in Cisco. Ben, first time on the Cube. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me in. So Ben, Cisco's UCS, really the compute platform, you know, sent ripples through the industry when it came out. It's been on the market for five years. So for our audience, you know, give us a little bit of context. Talk to us about, you know, what's brought us to where we are today and some of the updates. Of course, there was big announcement a couple of weeks ago with the latest in the UCS platform, but give us some of the background and your role in it. All right. Thanks very much. We're responsible for driving the solutions that we do with Oracle and other software partners and some of what we call our UCS integrated system platforms. So it's been a very exciting five years for us. We celebrated our fifth year anniversary with UCS earlier in the spring of this year. And during that period of time, we really brought this whole notion of fabric-based computing to the industry. We have introduced the fourth generation of this fabric-based computing technology just a couple of weeks ago in New York City, what we call the Grand Slam launch. So we're extending that UCS technology out both to the edge of the network with our branch-based solutions as well as up into the cloud with some of our hyper-scale or cloud-scale systems. So what's interesting about UCS is really that we really upended the whole industry in terms of changing the discussion to what we call fabric-based computing, where the server really sort of disappears into the fabric and what you're doing is really programming the capabilities of the computing system through APIs essentially. We've now got very close to 40,000 customers running the system worldwide. We this year surpassed 40,000 customers, so very, very large footprint, and we surpassed every other major system vendor this year for the first time. So we're the number one blade computing vendor in North America by revenues. We've surpassed everyone else in the industry. Well, as you said, the caveat on that is that blade servers in North America, so as a general, just in the compute market still, Cisco has gone from not being on the board to a top three vendor in global, in blade server, and overall in servers, I mean, you guys are on the board. We're on the move, and we're changing the model, and it's a perfect time for us to launch that next generation of the architecture. Yeah, so when I think back to where you really got that wedge, when Cisco first launched, Cisco actually would say to me, we're not a server manufacturer. As you said, making a fabric in many ways harkens back for many of us, suns saying that the network is the computer, but the part of the market that you guys really nailed hard was performance type solutions, such as databases that we're talking about here. So it took me a little bit architecturally. What did Cisco do differently? Why focus on really the performance end of the market, and how does that help drive the adoption? Sure, yeah. Well, performance is one of the key parameters that we look at, right? And you can see we have dozens of, you know, world number one performance metrics I saw, Ragu and MBR, who's really our architectural lead and performance lead at Cisco. We had them on earlier, right? Yesterday, yesterday. So we do have dozens of number one performance benchmarks with Oracle applications, e-business suite, and so forth running on top of the platform. But really, what we've done goes a lot further than performance. What we've done is really to focus on on fabric-based computing, on making the computing capabilities incredibly flexible, incredibly scalable. And as we look forward now, not only have we done that, and we have very, very large fraction of those close to 40,000 customers are running Oracle applications on our platform. What we're doing now is pushing forward in the industry, and bringing a lot of new capabilities to this fabric-based architecture, witness what we're doing with inter-cloud fabric this year, witness what we're doing with application-centric infrastructure this year, witness what we're doing with our management stack with things like UCS Director. These are all technologies which build on top of that fabric and enable much much more flexible cloud-style computing, not necessarily in a traditional like public cloud, but inside of a private cloud, inside of an organization, a lot of our customers want to keep their Oracle applications running inside their data center, and some of them want to build hybrid clouds where they're actually running in both locations. I mean, some of the cloud attributes is the simplicity and the flexibility of what we're offering. So Ben, I happen to sit through the keynote this morning. Okay. John Fowler talked about the systems design and really built out the story as to why the RedStack is the simplest and the highest performance for Oracle databases. So of course, in IT, we all have partners and that we also compete with Oracle's and good partner Cisco's. Obviously, you've got lots of Oracle applications on there. How do you position in the field as to what Cisco does differently for how you build the best platform versus Oracle saying they start with the application and drive all the way down through the stack to provide that full solution? Yeah. So we build what we call UCS integrated infrastructure systems. And there are a number of examples of that in the industry. You look at FlexPod is the solution architecture and portfolio have NetApp. You look at VSpecs and VBlock that we have with EMC. And there are many other great storage companies out there. Hitachi, I believe, has just completed a solution, Oracle 11 solution running on UCS. And they call it UCP Select. We work with Nimble Storage. Nimble has something called Smart Stack. So we have a number of different options in terms of how we deliver the technology. But they're all based on the same basic UCS architecture using UCS on the compute side, Nexus on the switching side, with or without our new technology, which we call ACI or eight the controller, as well as our director technology. So we start with that platform and then we partner with Vesta Breed, storage partners in different parts of the industry to build a holistic solution. So it includes the compute, the network, the storage, the management. And so when I think about, you know, engineered systems as Oracle would call them, we have a different approach. Our approach is very much to work with different partners across the industry and build holistic solutions that address specific Oracle type use cases. It's been very successful. These are all many of these integrated systems. These UCS integrated systems are multi-billion dollar businesses now for Cisco and for its partners. And I think the inner cloud is an interesting philosophy as well as a strategy, right? Because you guys are saying, we know people are going to use different types of clouds for different type of workloads. You may need to move some things around. And so rather than say there's only, you know, this way, you know, seem to be embracing not only in terms of partnering, but even thinking through for the customer being able to move applications and workloads around depending on whatever the situation is. Yeah, you know, a couple of years ago, Cisco came out with a marketing slogan. We called it the world of many clouds. And I have to admit, I was a little bit skeptical because at the time everyone seemed to be moving towards really just a small number of cloud for the cloud vendors. But as I joke, thanks to the NSA, a lot of countries, a lot of customers now become very concerned about where their data, where their corporate data is stored. And as it turns out, as I sit in a talk to customers on probably a weekly basis now, pretty much all of them want to have their enterprise platforms, their enterprise data close to where their corporation is based in country with service providers that are based in the country. Now that's a great thing, but it creates challenges. And so Cisco's way of approaching that has been to develop intercloud technology or intercloud fabric technology that will allow those many service providers and that world of many clouds to interoperate together so that we can actually move data and virtual machines, both bare metal and virtual machines from corporations into either hybrid cloud or public cloud scenarios and then between those clouds. That's a huge part of our strategy this year. You'll see it being used all across our service provider community. We've made a number of announcements this year and we'll be building that technology as a standard feature into our UCS integrated infrastructure systems. The same systems that we develop with our partners like NetApp and EMC and so forth. So a lot of good stuff to come in this area. So Ben, if we look at UCS, there's a lot of good gear there. Can you take us inside kind of the software piece and the integration discussion? How many software engineers do you have working on optimizing or understanding things like an Oracle configuration and do you do things uniquely for specific applications or is it about building the best platform that can then have optimizations on top of it? Well, I would say it's hard to answer the question about the number of engineers. Cisco is a pretty big company. We have literally oriented the whole company this last year or so towards developing cloud consumption models for critical workloads like Oracle. So it's safe to say there are many, many thousand engineers around Cisco. Both engineers developing the core UCS platform technology, many of the software technologies that we have running on top of it. Specifically with regard to Oracle, we have an extremely capable Oracle focused engineering team, software team, within our enterprise segments or within our data center organization who specialize in looking at specific Oracle applications, you know, e-business suite being an example of that. We've just released some solutions around JD Edwards with a partner here, Nimble Storage. We are working on many, many different solutions with different partners that are centered around Oracle use cases. So what do we do specific to Oracle? The number of things. I would say that we are specifically focusing on making sure that fabric-based architecture scales very cleanly, very easily, very simply for Oracle workloads. We are working on making sure that those systems can be managed in a very clean way. For the first time this year we actually provided integration points between the XML profiles that control UCS manager and Oracle's enterprise manager technology. So for the first time you can actually view every element of the UCS system from inside the Oracle enterprise manager and we'll be continuing to invest in that area. I'll point out one other thing that we've done this year. For the first time we actually have developed a joint customer education program or workshop with Oracle's enterprise Linux team. So for the very first time in fact we had our first training session a couple days ago here at Oracle World. We are bringing customers together and we're doing joint training with the Oracle's Linux organization and our UCS team to provide sort of the best of both worlds together. So if any customers are interested in that they should contact us and let us know. Ben, I wonder if you could talk to us a little bit about the management of these type of environments. If I listen to Oracle's message they really integrate the application management and infrastructure management because I just manage the application and the infrastructure just comes with it. If I think about containerization and what Docker does one of the big value propositions that people love is I can actually completely separate my application management from my infrastructure management. How does Cisco look at that interaction between the application the infrastructure and how does UCS play into this? Yeah more and more the way our platform is going to work. I mean in fact already does this with UCS but you'll start to see this happening with Nexus and the APIC controller is the infrastructure will simply be a programmable interface that you interact with as a programmer and it's going to become more and more accessible and relevant to the application teams, the DBAs, the basis administrators and so forth within your organization. That's already happened with UCS manager today. UCS manager is essentially an XML based software interface that allows you to program that infrastructure and all the elements in it from a software interface. So really we don't think about you know you mentioned earlier that we don't really talk about being a server company we're really not a server company. We're a computing platform that will more and more become flexible, scalable, cloud-like both within the organization and in the cloud and software programmers will interface with those APIs whether it be the XML interface that we use with the UCS system or the APIC controller interface that will allow a much, much smarter, more network-savvy fabric for applications. So we'll see more and more of that. So Ben you said you're talking to customers every week which is great. You've got 40,000 customers. I wonder if you could talk about kind of the adoption and the embracing of cloud-style computing in the enterprise for tier one types of applications and how that's kind of changed over time. Where are we on that process? Are we early days, middle innings, you know is it pretty much standard, you know, Larry stood up on stage and blessed it. Oracle's in cloud now so I guess cloud is okay which we always joke about. He waits a couple years then he comes in and blesses and we all move forward. Where is it from the customer perspective in terms of really the adoption of this style of computing from your point of view? Yeah I think, look, it's a journey. As we've seen and we've all been in the IT industry for many years that these are typically decade-long transitions. We're early to midstream, right? I would say that just about every customer we talk to now has a strategy or has an imperative to embrace cloud for some of their use cases. For the most part I have not found that our enterprise customers or larger enterprise customers are ready to move their core data, their core business processes into the cloud completely. There will always be some things they're willing to move but it's a slow process and I think what we've done as a corporation is really focus on enabling what we call hybrid cloud use cases or private cloud use cases where you have a mixture of both and so that's where things like intercloud technology become very very useful. Having a management paradigm or a management approach that allows different portions of an application stack to run on-premise versus in the cloud that's very much part of our philosophy as a company. There's tons of activity going on in different engineering groups around Cisco to enable that in a very uniform way. So it's a transition. Ben I'm wondering as we as we close out the segment, take us inside a customer story. You've got 40,000 of them. Can you give us a story of a customer that's doing something today that they just couldn't do with the old style of infrastructure? Well I won't mention specific customers by name on the spot but I will tell you that we do have thousands and thousands. I mean we've had different estimates of the fraction of our total customer base that are running Oracle applications on UCS and it runs you know up to a third a half something like that. It's a huge huge number. I would say most of them are are learning their way through this transition just as we are as vendors and probably you are as analysts and pundits in the industry into the cloud transition. They are also having to deal at the same time with the you know the explosion of data-oriented applications and use cases. Big data we've talked about that in a number of different sessions. So it's very much it's very much a career changing transition for many of us and also a very imperative very impactful change from a business perspective. In the case of our Oracle customers I think a lot of them are starting to experiment within memory types of databases, big data types of use cases, obviously cloud transition and so it is having a big impact. So what would you say it's the changing role of that IT team? What I saw in many ways is you took someone that might have been a network engineer and now he you know the fabric engineer or you know handling just a larger piece of the stack whether it's just with UCS or also with the storage partners expanding on virtualization. Is it that maturation of moving beyond a silo? Is that one of the more innovative things they've done? You know the roles themselves, the skill sets, the careers are changing themselves right as we go through this process. I talked to actually just in the last week we had our customer advisory board here in San Jose. We brought in 30 or 40 of our largest UCS customers and one of the key messages we heard from some of the customers was literally the definition of the roles and the skill sets of their organizations on the IT team are changing. They're in some cases having challenges hiring people with the right skill sets to make to make this transition happen for their company. So you know that probably is the most impactful statement I can think of really and when you think about how transcendental this is to companies into their businesses. Is it really the types of roles or just the structure of the roles or just the training? It is the type of the role, it's the structure of the role, it's the skill set. I mean how many people, you know, how many Python engineers are there out there, how many engineers are there who understand how to implement you know APIC based fabrics, how many engineers are there out there out there that understand fabric-based computing, you know inter-cloud technology. These are all new things that are coming out just in the last couple of years. So it's an incredibly exciting time for us. It really points towards dramatically different types of IT capabilities here in the next couple of years. But it's also one that we all have to keep our eye on the ball on, right? We all have to make sure that we're learning the technology and changing our own career paths and in our organizational capabilities along the way. That's a great way to wrap the segment. We're getting the hook. So Ben, thanks for stopping by, you heard it here. It's really a transformational period both in the technology as well as the roles and what we all have to do with our careers. So you know keep on top of it, stay with it. The things are only going to accelerate. It's an exciting opportunity and I think that's why there's such a buzz here at Oracle Open World 2014. So again, you're watching theCUBE. I'm Jeff Frick. We've been here all day today, yesterday, the day before. Waldwall coverage will continue to be here to the end of the day bringing you the insight that you're looking for. Thanks for watching. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.