 Live from San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE, covering Oracle Open World 2015 from Studio C, brought to you by Cisco. Now your host, Stu Miniman and Jeff Brick. Welcome to theCUBE. This is SiliconANGLE Media's signature program. We go out to all the big technology events, help extract the signal from the noise. I'm Stu Miniman with wikibond.com, here for three days in the Cisco booth at Oracle Open World, Moscone South, here in San Francisco. Joining me for this segment is Jeff Freik, who's the general manager of theCUBE. Jeff, back at Oracle Open World, here in Moscone. Lots going on with theCUBE. Studio C, Stu, we're happy to be here. Remember last year, the theme was that Larry basically anointed the cloud, if I recall, and really kind of introduced it. And man, they've really moved their cloud mode since then, the Howard Street is shut down, it's the cloud, what is it, the cloud? Cloud Plaza, I believe. Cloud Plaza, thank you. And really it's all about cloud, it's all about applications, it's all about big data, and Larry and the keynote yesterday made some pretty significant pronouncements about where he's going, who he's looking at, who he's not looking at, and kind of what's next. What did you think of the keynote last night? Yeah, so Larry's always interesting. I mean, he came out, you know, punching, you know, red meat here, you know, who's the competition, he's like, oh, you know, well, Salesforce, you know, we're seeing them, Workday, we're seeing them, you know, SAP, I don't see them anymore. And you know, oh, okay, you know, in some of the other environments, he's like, IBM, I never run across IBM anymore. It's like, that's ridiculous. I mean, we've got our team out in Vegas right now at IBM Insight. I mean, talk about what IBM is doing in the analytics space. I would say that if Oracle's not seeing IBM, I don't know where they're hanging out. Well, IBM certainly has made the move aggressively, you know, they shed their old PC business. They're way into the cloud. We do a lot of IBM events with Interconnect and they're solidly in the camp. But what's kind of interesting to do is this whole kind of hybrid cloud versus public cloud. Obviously big news last week with Dell and the purchase of BMC World, we were there. If you haven't looked at Michael Dell's cube interview, check it out on SiliconANGLE.tv. So that's a big mega deal. We were at AWS a few weeks before that. So cloud is really driving it. This kind of wrangling about public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud. I think the bigger thing is how cloud has changed the way that IT operates. It's changed the expectations of the way IT needs to deliver and it is really accelerating the pace of business. Yeah, yeah, Jeff, you mentioned some really good things. We've talked a lot about public cloud and there's that wrangling about what's private, what's hybrid, new terms actually enterprise cloud. So you've got companies as to, how are we going to run these mission critical environments? Oracle's pitch is that they've been spending the last, 10 years converting some of these mission critical mainstream application and making sure that they run really well and security is also one of the big themes of the week and the announcement Mark heard talking this morning about what they're doing building into really the merging of software and Silicon. So many of us when Oracle bought Sun was like, oh, well, Sun was kind of crashing from the old dot com era, Sun really highlighted a lot of that and in the interview with John Fowler yesterday really showed that Spark is not dead, it's doing quite well and it is critical as to the infrastructure that sits between both what they put on bram and what lives in the Oracle enterprise cloud. So really see that bridging. Similar, you mentioned we were at Dell World last week, Microsoft and Dell talking about the CPS system that can sit both in your environment or in Microsoft's environment with Dell providing hardware for both of those. I really feel we've gone beyond just talking about cloud, it's really coming into a lot of focus and of course theCUBE documenting this journey for everyone. Yeah, John Fowler interview was terrific. Again, you can check that out too at siliconangle.tv. Kind of debunking the whole flash thing and Stu, you want to dig in a little bit more about kind of storage, all this stuff ultimately has to sit in storage and flash is very exciting kind of the lead item over the last couple of years in terms of change, but Fowler's view flash is nice, but I want everything eventually to be in memory and really kind of driving a vision of the future of the future of the data centers where everything is in memory and with the incredible pace of war's law it's not hard to imagine where this is going to be in just a couple of years. Yeah, Wikibon CTO David Flawyer's done a really good job really helping educate the industry and dig into these architectures because absolutely it'd be great if I could have the highest performance thing for all environments but there's a lot of consideration. There's cost, how can I fit it all in? David Flawyer wrote a really seminal piece on flash's memory extension and we're going to have a lot of companies on theCUBE here in the Cisco booth talking about flash so we're going to have IBM storage, we're going to have Nimble, we're going to have EMC and flash of course is critical to what's going on. If you go to wikibon.com you can actually see David's most recent piece on how all flash is impacting Oracle environments. Definitely something that we're passionate about and writing quite a lot at. The article I wrote coming out on the plane here is talking about it. It's really about moving beyond just storage to storage. It's about systems, it's about platforms and it's about cloud and how that all ties together. So Cisco of course at the center of many environments with their UCS Oracle with the Exadata building the whole red stack. So interesting times so much to dig into as we go through these interviews. So Stu explain to the folks kind of where does Cisco fit, where does UCS fit? Obviously the names that come up in the cloud discussion all the time. Always leads with AWS, Microsoft and the Azure cloud kind of highlighted by moving 365 for Windows. Google's kind of sitting there, they don't make as much noise but they're doing a lot of stuff and you have kind of the open stack strategy for a lot of people and then you've got VMware and those are kind of the big five. Where does Cisco fit in? What is the UCS story and how does that fit in this whole thing? First there's the easy part so you mentioned UCS but if you talk from a networking standpoint Jeff of course every enterprise customer has some Cisco gear, they are ubiquitous, they are dominant in their space. UCS was actually one of those really big bold moves that most people didn't understand when it happened. In the piece that I just wrote I said we're going to go look five years from now and say that Dell acquisition of EMC created huge ripples in the ecosystem. The most recent ripple that I had seen that was as large was when Cisco launched the UCS. So I was actually working at one of the storage companies when I had heard about it and I said wow this is going to just change the game. You saw HP was one of Cisco's largest partners for networking and of course became enemy number one once Cisco launched the UCS. But UCS is core to Cisco's data center practice as well as really underpinning as to what they build their clouds on. So what we're seeing is these stacks that people are building with the infrastructure should both be the same on-prem and in the cloud. That's what Oracle's talking about when they build theirs. That's what Dell talks about. And that's what we're starting to see with Cisco even though fleshing out what Cisco calls their intercloud it's still relatively early days on that. We've done quite a few interviews. Talked to Lou Tucker about that at the OpenStack show. Of course Cisco's huge into OpenStack. Cisco has lots of partnerships which we're going to highlight this week. I've done a lot of interviews with Cisco and Red Hat for example. So UCS is the leader in the converged infrastructure space. They've got dozens of partnerships with the storage group and you're really seeing that extend into where the cloud discussion goes. It's really Cisco's partnerships with service providers interconnecting all of those pieces. And hence they call it the intercloud is their strategy. And definitely an area I want to dig further into and try to understand the maturity of that. Yeah and it's a good point that he makes too because Cisco we cover a lot of shows. We'll do 70 shows this year. And Cisco's at a lot of them. They really have an aggressive partner strategy. They're at the OpenStack events. You mentioned there at Red Hat Summit. They're at all the big data events. So they're a really super active participant in this kind of broader community around cloud and around big data in support of, you know, what they're doing with UCS. So it's a great, great times. Obviously great times to be in this business. Tons of disruption makes opportunities. It's going to take out some people that are paying attention. But clearly there's never been a kind of a more golden age I think. Oh yeah, Jeff, I mean, you think back that there was a great article written about the four horsemen of the internet era. And Cisco was one of them. Now, if we were to kind of give the Mount Rushmore of cloud right now, not sure that Cisco would be there but they are critically important. Their business is doing solid. Of course, had the recent management change with, you know, Chuck Robbins now as the CEO, making some big moves and, you know, trying to get an understanding of, you know, where Cisco wants to play in this next era. But absolutely, Cisco, a lot of partnerships. Of course, big presence here at the show, right in the front of the show floor. Look forward to people at the show. Come by, check it out, and you know, come talk to us during the breaks. Yeah, the last thing still I want to get your thoughts on is you've been studying the space for a long time. It's kind of the whole virtualization space, right? So the server's got virtualized, storage is being virtualized, but in every, you know, kind of compute environment, it's storage, it's compute, and then it's networking. You got to move the data around. How's the kind of this evolution on the networking side really helping enabling kind of this cloud revolution that we're going through? Yeah, so it's interesting, and the networking side, we've had the discussions of kind of SDN. We've also had the other pieces, network functions, virtualization, which tends to be more for the service providers. But really, you know, what customers are looking for is number one, I need simplification. On the storage side, we said, you know, there's way too much time trying to configure LUNs and, you know, manually tweaking all of those geek knobs. Well, fortunately on networking, there's a lot of the same things. I tend to put an environment together, and once it's set up, you know, don't breathe on that. You know, don't update the firmware. Don't touch it, because it's fragile. And that's not a good thing, Jeff. What we need is, if we're going to talk about security, how do we make sure we're secure? Well, we better make sure we've got the latest patches in the updates, then we can't have a hole in the security. So we need to get to an environment where I can understand that change management better. I can move forward to be able to get patches. And many of these things need to be automated. If my job today is setting up VLANs, boy, you know, we've been talking about this for like 10 years, it feels like. It's not that I just, you know, set up a script and do it. It is how do I programmatically set in so that I can handle change management easier. The word we've been using at the last few shows is, IT too often is creating friction, and therefore we need to have solutions that become frictionless. And it's not that I can wave a magic wand. As I look at it, any network engineer would say, there's no such thing as removing a bottleneck from the system. Really what you do is you remove the bottleneck in one place, and someplace else is now the bottleneck, right? Same thing when it comes to complexity, Jeff, is overall, I can't remove the complexity, but I can take tools, things like Chef Puppet, Ansible, and Salt, where I can spend some time, understand my processes, and make it easier, and therefore I don't have to do that over and over. And I think, you know, most people, you know, not just IT and business in general, if you were to say, you know, hey, next year are you going to have more work or are you going to have less work? The answer is, I'm always going to have more work. So what can I do today to help make it easier for the future? It's tough, and that's why, especially the enterprise, it is difficult to undergo those changes. But we need to be making smart decisions to be able to undertake new technologies and new processes so that we can move forward. Yeah, it's funny you say, you can't just wipe, swing the magic wand, but really what Amazon showed is you should be able to swipe a credit card in terms of the guy at the front end of the process who's driving the test dev, building the application. So it is a big expectation shift to get the back end orchestration, the back end to be able to support that, yeah, it should be just as easy as swiping a credit card, and that's what Shadow IT proved. Enterprise IT is trying to take it back, and it's going to be an ongoing evolution. So we've got a great day ahead of us, Stu. Three days of wall-to-wall coverage from Studio C on the exhibit floor here at Oracle Open World. I'm Jeff Frick with Stu Miniman. You're live watching theCUBE. We'll be right back on our first capture after this short segment. Okay.