 Sateesh Lakshmanan, why don't you come on in, Sateesh? And Sateesh is a long time cube alum. He's been on the cube many times. Flew up here this morning, thanks very much for making the time. Great to be here. Great to see you again. Looking sharp as usual. All kinds of crazy action. You flew right into the storm. Salesforce, Oracle, the urinary Olympics, it just doesn't get any better than this, does it? It's a perfect, exciting time. We introduced a couple of new products. Yeah, we're going to talk about that, and looking forward to the update. So, Oracle Open World, arguably the largest tech show that's out there. Oracle, of course, really the center of the data universe and has been for many, many years, and your business is a lot about data, of course, so a lot of your customers are running Oracle. But let's start with what's new in your world, Sateesh. You guys had a bunch of product announcements. Let me set it up. We have talked a lot over the last couple of years about the transitions that are underway. A faster fiber channel, Ethernet, 10-giggy, fiber channel over Ethernet, and the users that we talk to are struggling. Okay, they're trying to figure out, which way do I go? Do I have to make a choice? Will I get locked in? So the announcements that you've made this week are all about giving more flexibility and more choice. I want you, I said this week, but this past month, all about more flexibility, more choice. Take us through what you announced, what the philosophy is, and then we'll get into it. Sure, thanks. Like you said, Oracle Open World is a fantastic show, really important to a lot of enterprise-class customers, and we wanted to align a new product announcement with Oracle Open World so we could talk more about it at this venue. So what we announced last week was basically three family of products that provide true flexibility for cloud-based customers, you know, multi-protocol products from the adapter side, allow host to connect to fabric, from SWIT side, allows native fiber channel support or converge support, and even from the router side, that allows you to convert from one protocol to the other. So the entire portfolio of Q-logic product from an infrastructure perspective that allows customers to embrace and choose at their own pace any technology that meets their data center requirements, whether they're traditional land-sand discreet enterprise-class customers or they're cloud providers who want to provide infrastructure or platform as a service. So from a customer standpoint, what does a customer have to do to take advantage of that capability? Is it really as simple as sort of saying, I just want to run whatever I want to run and the system detects it, do I have to, are there any prerequisites that are required to set that up? How difficult is it for a customer to take advantage of that? So it's really easy. So what we are offering is a choice in one of two ways. Our go-to-market model, as you're well aware, is very OEM-based. So if an end user wants a particular configuration from the OEM, they just tell the OEM what configuration they want, and when they get a server or something, it gets pre-configured in whatever personality that they choose if that's how they want to deploy it. The other operational model is when an actual end customer, an end user, who maybe initially wants to deploy a fiber channel, can deploy a fiber channel, and through migrating the firmware load can chain that personality to the CNA if they want to reconfigure the rack with service. So that's another way to do it. So Satish, when I heard this announcement, first of all, it's great that the industry is stepping up, and I think listening to customers who have said, well, I'm nervous about going to all Ethernet, all FCOE, and I want choice. So that's good that you guys are listening. I think it's fabulous. Having said that, what does it mean for, in your opinion, FCOE? Because I can see a lot of customers saying, oh, great, oh, thank goodness, I can now stay with fiber channel a little bit longer. Is that a correct interpretation? Are you seeing that in the marketplace, and what are your expectations for FCOE adoption? Sure, great question, Dave. We're seeing some of that. If you look at what analysts had predicted a couple of years ago as to what the FCOE adoption would look like, it fell well short of the expectations. So FCOE adoption is slower, and our view is we really don't want to force any one technology or protocol onto the end customer. We want to give them full choice. So truly protocol agnosticity is kind of our strategy. And what we are saying is, if you want to continue a native fiber channel path, continue down that path, if you truly want to adopt convergence and reap the benefits of it at the edge from a total cost of ownership and performance perspective, do so. You don't care. We don't care. Okay, good. So I want to talk about this notion of end to end. It's something that comes up a lot, especially when you talk to customers, right? Especially with virtualization. Virtualization changes everything. It becomes this big black box. I don't know what's going on in the middle. And so customers are increasingly saying, all right, can you give me a management stack that can give me end to end visibility that allows me to do performance management and tuning and other things that I want to do. Is that something that you're hearing and what role, if any, can Q-Logic play to facilitate that? Yeah, so great question. We're absolutely hearing that. If you look at Oracle, since we are in the open world, the database solution, the optimized database solution that they provide, truly vertically integrated database solution is powered by Q-Logic technology. Now, we have certainly seen customers who want to go to companies like Oracle of truly vertically integrated and saying, give me an optimized solution. If they want to embrace virtualization, as you talked about, they really want it from end to end. What they don't want is a piecemeal solution where only at the IO side there's some virtualization and there's no way to stitch it together when it comes to the fabric and actually be able to virtualize storage and be able to migrate those applications in order to maintain business continuity and resiliency. So, different requirement from customers, what we do, our strategy is to make it easier. So, we want to integrate our solution along with the VM providers, whether that's Oracle VM, Oracle Enterprise Linux, we want to make it easy to manage it from the fabric side so our switch management solutions get integrated along with the open APIs that we provide. And we basically want, whoever is a truly vertically integrated company like Oracle, to integrate our products and technology so that they can provide exactly what the customer's warned, which is the entire stack optimized for the application. So, that would be Oracle writing to your APIs to enable that end to end visibility. Correct. So, we just expose the API and make it easy for them to integrate our driver stack, software stack. Okay, so you release an SDK and the developers go at it. I want to follow up on that because you guys, very obviously, very strong at the adapter level in CNAs, you've got the edge switches, if you will. The core is not your sweet spot. And so, you've got, I guess if you look at where you're going with the power of the edge switches, you can start to see them getting more core-like in terms of capabilities, but that's not your install base. So, you could provide that end to end visibility through those API, working with whosoever core switches. Yep. Right? That's exactly right. And then your management stack or somebody else's management stack, is it a manager of manager type of thing? Explain how that will work. It's typically the OEM's management stack. So, what we provide is our APIs that basically allow their management utilities to talk to our driver in firmware, right? And similarly, we provide our own management utility, but it's a very point-based solution. It only allows an end customer to manage your adapter. Conversely, if you look at a virtualized solution, right, we open up APIs to, you know, VMWare or Oracle or whoever, right? And through their management utilities, people can manage the virtualized environments on host or storage. So, it's really, we're giving, again, going back to the previous strategy I talked about, it's about choice. We're not forcing them to use the utilities that we want to expose. And whatever an end customer chooses, they want to use a VMM, a virtual machine manager, management utility. If they want to use an OEM management utility, if they want to use third-party management utilities, they want to do it from the fabric. We just want to expose our products to it. Okay, well, we're here at OpenWorld, so let's talk a little bit about Oracle. You and I have talked about virtualization, the impacts of virtualization. You know, we were at VMWare a month ago, VMWorld a month ago, and obviously, it's a tremendous uptake there. What's different about Oracle? So, one of the biggest values that we see, it's truly vertically integrated, right? If you look at some of Oracle's competitors, they don't have all the way application down to the hardware nail down. So if you look at all of the IP that they own from the Spark processors, all the way up to the actual database type application, that they can provide a complete solution. Where we fit into that is our driver stack is key to providing that integrated solution. So if they want to run, I've talked about earlier about some of our IO product capability, where we provide true application performance for key block sizes like Oracle Exchange, Oracle old TP OLAP type of applications. So what Oracle has done has taken their database applications, optimized it to run on QL or IO, right? Tuned it in such a way that a customer truly sees the application benefits compared to any of the previous generation products. So that's how we fit in. We're integrated into it down to the application level, which is optimized to run on a hardware. So that vertically integrated, all Oracle, all the time stack actually makes your life a lot easier? Absolutely, absolutely. And I guess you're, I'm inferring from your statement, it makes customers' lives a lot easier. It makes the customer lives a lot easier. They can consolidate operations on a single piece of hardware. They can go to Oracle for support and they cover everything from hardware to software that QLogic provides. But isn't that the mother of all walk-ins? It's unbelievable. And that's why if you hear the earnings announcement from Larry Ellison, he talks about the high margins, right? Indeed. You know, that's an interesting topic, right? Because there's clearly value in that vertically integrated stack. And you're seeing the entire industry is going that way, whether it's Oracle, which is the furthest end of the spectrum that we've all read, to take something like, you know, what EMC's doing with VMware and Cisco and having a virtual integration strategy. But, you know, pretty much the entire world is doing it. Even pure play companies like NetApp are doing it with Cisco and VMware. And you can't answer this question, but I've been thinking about it a lot. What is the value of that? You know, and how do customers go through that decision process in terms of, okay, I know I'm going to get locked in, but there's, but I know there's value there. You know, there's got to be a business case around it. I'm sure many customers make that business case, but have you ever had that discussion with customers or even your OEMs? We've had some of this trade-off. I think it just comes down to what gives, what solution, whether it's vertically integrated, whether it's locked in or whatever, gives them the peace of mind. And I think that's the bottom line. That's where it comes down to. Yeah, so it's kind of, I guess it's, I think of it, I'm sure there may be more parameters, but there's certainly cost and there's certainly risk, which is the peace of mind, peace, and then there's business value. Absolutely. I guess it's depending, it's always about the application. I guess it's depending upon the application. Yep. If you've got a high value application that's super high risk, Yeah. Cost is going to be less important. Yeah. And you're willing to pay that premium. You know, you don't mind as much. You mind getting locked in after you're locked in, and you're paying that price, but it's driving, you know, hundreds of millions of billions of dollars of revenue. Yeah. You know, you're not going to worry about it. What is that trade-off, that spectrum? And if you continue down that thought, you know, some of the differentiated features that Oracle provides. So, you know, there's a lot of talk at Oracle Open World about, you know, T10 diff, kind of data integrity, data protection kind of technologies, which we are closely working with. So if you think of what the value they bring, other than just pure vertical integration application optimized, they're also bringing them additional functionality that provides business continuity, disaster recovery type of solutions that they can get from one place, one stop shop. Yeah, so, I mean, while we're on the topic, I mean, the whole consolidation of the industry, you've been in the industry a while, you're savvy, you've watched the trends. I mean, you remember when it was a business model advantage to be, you know, purely focused on your own little area. Absolutely. And, of course, Q-Logic became, you know, a great company doing that. It's come full circle, kind of. And now you're getting into other areas, and you see, look at EMC is a classic example of a pure-play storage company that, you know, I mean, I guess they're a storage company. Yeah. But there's virtualization, there's documentum, there's security, you know, who knows? What do you think that means for Q-Logic? And what does it mean for the industry, that consolidation trend? So one thing is, I think it's nothing but good for Q-Logic, right? That's growth opportunity. If you think about historically what we were, we were a fiber channel company, and our growth was tied to how much fiber channel uptake happens at the back in the data center. Now, with convergence happening, with transition happening on the storage side, on the server side, opens up tremendous opportunity for us. We now have the ability to sell products, not just into those niche back-end server type of applications. We can sell it to storage vendors, we can sell it to server vendors, we can integrate with fabric vendors, we can provide true end-to-end integrated solutions, provide software value and differentiation to the end customer through our OEM partners. So it's an opportunity for us to grow beyond that traditional company that we were. And Oracle's got an incredibly powerful model there. I mean, there's a lot of vertical integration going on, but Oracle, as I said, takes it to the limit because of the applications and the data. And that's a very impressive, and that's what's driving a lot of Oracle's profits. I wanted to talk about Romly. Romly's coming, share with our audience, what is Romly, why is it important, what does it mean for Q-Logic and the networking and storage business? Yeah, sure, great question. So it's next generation Intel CPU architecture, it adds PCI-Gen3 capabilities to servers. So a really powerful set of CPUs, shipping probably around Q1 from most tier one server OEMs in Q1 of calendar year 12, aligns very well with the introduction of next generation technology. So 16-geek fiber-chome, for example, for back-end database type of applications, broad base adoption of 10 gigabit ethernet, whether it's a LOM, whether it's a door to card, that allows pure two ports of networking connectivity to converge connectivity from two free ports that you get on a server. So all of these technology transitions, convergence happening in rack and tower and blade, adoption in next generation 16-geek fiber-channel technology, all of it is tied to more powerful CPUs. So it's a great opportunity for us to sell more Q-Logic products. So how will that drive 10-geek adoption? Because you're seeing 10-geek largely at the core today, right, how will Romly affect that in your opinion? So with CPU becoming much more powerful, which virtualization getting adopted more and more, so people running more applications on one physical server, IO starts to become a bandwidth limitation, right? So with reason that drives one gig to 10-geek transition, if you go back and you look at Westmere or even the Nehalem-based platforms, all the basic connectivity coming out of the server is one gigabit ethernet. So that's being forced to migrate to 10-geek now because we were talking to VMware recently and they're saying if you just run VMotion traffic, you can very quickly saturate a 10-geek pipe, right? Everybody's running VMotion traffic. Everybody's running VMotion for virtualization. So what it really means is it drives 10-geek, it drives requirement for next generation even fiber channel technologies, which means we can sell more product. So it's more of a growth story for us, kind of commensurate with the uptake of Romly-based platforms. Data growth, networking, storage guys here in the center of it all, Satish, thanks very much for flying up today and spending some time on theCUBE. Enjoy the rest of Open World and it's great to see you, my friend. Thanks for the opportunity, good to see you again. I appreciate it.